Soon you will be able to help change the world with the click of a mouse.

That’s the philosophy of the upcoming website ENDcrowd.com, a crowdfunding platform designed to put an end to human trafficking by showing people their contributions matter, according to the group’s marketing manager and NC State alumna Caitlyn West.

On Thursday, Oct. 2, the website will go live to the public, allowing anyone interested to learn about human trafficking and the fight against it.  

The website gives people the option to donate to 15 organizations, each of which seeks to tackle an aspect of the human trafficking epidemic, West said. In this way, the website differentiates itself from other non-profit organizations by pulling common causes together.

“We did a really large research of who was involved in the field and what problems were in the U.S.,” said Joanna Foss, the organization’s program development manager and graduate student in public administration. “It helped us figure out where the void was and what we should be doing to address that.”

According to the United States government, human trafficking includes “recruiting, harboring, transporting, providing, or obtaining a person for compelled labor or commercial sex acts through the use of force, fraud, or coercion.”

Human trafficking makes up the second largest illegal industry in the world (tied with the illegal weapons trade) and generates $150 billion annually, according to the International Labour Organization. However, Foss said groups fighting human trafficking have an estimated one percent of that budget in funds, according to research conducted by ENDcrowd.com founder Joe Schmidt.

Human trafficking is a modern-day form of slavery, according to ENDcrowd.com. However, human trafficking does not always require moving the victim unlike the name suggests.

“People often think slavery died with the Emancipation Proclamation, but that’s not true,” Foss said. “In 2000, it was given a legal definition and a name in the United States. Before, it was kind of looped into the Women’s Rights Movements and AIDS, so it’s kind of always been here; it was just under a different name.”   

West said students can get involved with ENDcrowd.com in many different ways, such as donating money or sharing the website on social media.

“You don’t have to go rescue people from brothels…we need people on all fronts because a multifaceted issue needs a multifaceted solution,” Foss said.

Because human trafficking operates as a business, it will continue to exist as long as people continue to make a profit from it, according to Foss.

“We want to see that business effectively going out of business, so you work to stop demand and work to stop the supply,” Foss said. “Our main goal is to make collaboration with antitrust organizations. Because the problem is so massive, there was no platform to talk to one another, so we wanted to bring people together to learn about it and engage them.”

To do this, the website divides the solution to human trafficking into six categories: awareness, stopping demand, aftercare, prevention, research and good business. Users then navigate to these links for a description of the solution and related philanthropies.

Each organization aims to raise $3,000 to $10,000 by the end of this year, Foss said. 

From there, ENDcrowd.com is planning to spend another year reevaluating and revamping the site to promote more fundraisers the year after, according to West.

The project is one in a line of many future endeavors planned by Audacity Factory, an organization dedicated to providing solutions to both domestic and world problems lacking attention, resources or expertise, according to its website.

Joe Schmidt founded Audacity Factory in January. He had a number of successful startups and wanted to take his business approaches to underserved areas of the nonprofit world, West said.

Of those areas, human trafficking made the top of his list after attending a conference about trafficking, where he learned the practice exists in the U.S., according to West.

“It totally broke his heart,” West said.

West said the conference made Schmidt think of his three daughters, because about 80 percent of human trafficking victims are female and as much as half of all victims are minors, according to the U.S. State Department.  

West said she is excited for ENDcrowd.com to finally go live Thursday, as well as to see the publics’ response.