Stephanie's Interview with Inside BusinessStephanie's Interview with Inside Business
Resilience in Life and Leadership
Stephanie Olson talks with Inside Business about human trafficking, social media risks, and why prevention education and early conversations with children matter. The discussion also touches on nonprofit realities, leadership challenges, and how communities and businesses can play a role in keeping people safer.
1:01:48•9 Sept 2026
Resilience, Human Trafficking Prevention, and Tough Conversations with Stephanie Olson
Episode Overview
- Human trafficking often involves fraud and coercion rather than dramatic kidnappings, and can occur while victims still live at home and attend school.
- Social media and gaming remove geographical boundaries, exposing children and teens in any community to traffickers and recruiters.
- Early, frequent, non-fear-based conversations with children about safety, relationships and online behaviour are key to prevention.
- Behaviour changes, new older friends, secrecy and hyper-submissive body language can be warning signs worth questioning and, in some cases, reporting.
- Running a nonprofit effectively requires clear mission focus, diversified funding, collaboration and leadership that trusts and empowers the team.
“Awareness is like saying, ‘Hey, just so you know, human trafficking is here. It’s bad. It sucks. Good luck.’ Prevention is actually giving people tools to stop it before it starts.”
Get ready to be moved by real-life accounts of resilience and hard truths about human trafficking. This conversation centres on Stephanie Olson, CEO of The Set Me Free Project, as she chats with Inside Business hosts Travis Feiling and Gary Tharnish about why prevention education matters so much. You’ll hear Stephanie explain how her nonprofit focuses on human trafficking prevention, social media safety, and healthy relationships, and why she chose education over restoration work.
She shares that human trafficking is "the use of force, fraud, or coercion to compel an individual for services, labor, or commercial sex," and breaks the myth that it’s always about kidnapping or shadowy strangers in trench coats. Instead, she talks about grooming, long-term manipulation, and cases where victims still live at home, get good grades, and are trafficked by a boyfriend or even family members.
Parents and carers will likely lean in when Stephanie describes kids’ online lives, small-town mindsets meeting global access via social media, and her own parenting regrets around monitoring tech. Her book *Talk Early, Talk Often* is built around the idea that conversations about safety and exploitation should start so early that children can’t remember the first time they were raised.
The chat also swings into nonprofit realities: cutthroat competition for funding, the importance of running a charity like a business, avoiding mission drift, and letting a leadership team truly lead instead of micromanaging everything. Stephanie stresses collaboration over turf wars and challenges business owners to think about training staff and supporting prevention efforts in their communities.
If you’ve ever thought "that could never happen here" or "my kids are fine", this episode gently but firmly questions that comfort and offers practical ways to respond. How early are you willing to start the hard conversations in your own family or workplace?
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