Healing Action

Katie Rhoades, Healing Action's Founder & Executive Director, endured commercial sexual exploitation (CSE) and addiction. After she left "the life" and started healing, she began the journey of helping others who have had similar experiences. While in graduate school at Washington University, she found significant gaps in the St. Louis region regarding understanding and assisting survivors of CSE. Thus, Healing Action was born.

Healing Action is devoted to serving as a safety net and stepping-stone for survivors. The primary focus is to help individuals who have survived sex trafficking and CSE heal and rebuild their lives on their own terms.

Sex trafficking is the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, obtaining, patronizing, or soliciting a person for a commercial sex act. It involves using force, fraud, or coercion to make an adult engage in commercial sex acts. All of our clients have different experiences, backgrounds, and stories, but they all have one thing in common, they've been victims of sexual violation.

Healing Action is the only provider of peer-led, clinical support for CSE in the state of Missouri. Survivors lead the therapeutic force - which makes Healing Action unique from other agencies doing similar work. A model of experiential-based support is crucial for serving this population effectively because it is the highest caliber of practical hope for victims. Services are led by survivors who forged their own path out and acquired the training, education, and credentials worthy of this calling.

Through individual and group-based modalities, Healing Action uses a creative array of client-centered, trauma-informed therapeutic work. Due to the education and clinical experience of our founder, all services are rooted in evidence-based, trauma-informed care.

Due to clients' extensive and complex trauma, Healing Action's length of services are based on long term support and are not time limited. Healing Action engages in a "once a client, always a client" policy, so non-active clients can re-engage and receive services.