About Us
Stronger Together Ending Exploitation (STEE) is the first collaborative of its kind in Seattle and King County, bringing together Black leaders, researchers, survivor-led organizations, grassroots advocates, and established institutions with a resilient history in the fight against commercial sexual exploitation (CSE) We were created out of both necessity and vision to build solidarity across communities, sectors, and lived experiences so that no one has to face exploitation or systemic harm alone.
Who makes up STEE?
Our Purpose
STEE exists to confront exploitation and gender-based violence at every level: personal, cultural, and systemic.
To unify our diverse expertise of academic, professional, and lived experience, we have designed culturally appropriate, trauma-informed strategies that reflect the realities of survivors and communities most impacted by inequity.
Our work is dedicated to dismantling harmful systems, shifting the narrative to prioritize African American populations, challenge laws, rewrite policies that perpetuate exploitation, and build pathways toward long-term healing and empowerment.
Our Vision
We believe in a future where commercial sexual exploitation is no longer tolerated, and where survivors lead efforts to heal, dismantle and transform systems.
Through STEE, we are cultivating new models of collective care where coordinated service delivery, mutual accountability, and survivor leadership replace fragmented systems and isolated responses.
Together, we are building something more than a partnership; we are shaping a movement. A movement rooted in justice, anchored in healing, and carried forward by the voices and leadership of survivors and communities who refuse to be silenced.
Get to know the STEE Team
Yasmeen
Yasmeen is the founder and CEO of Survivors Inspire Solutions (SIS), an organization providing lived experience consulting and healing services to individuals and organizations that support marginalized communities with experiencers of domestic violence, homelessness, substance use disorder, and sex trafficking.
Yasmeen brings a unique blend of insight, lived experience, professional expertise, and deep compassion to helping create survivor-centered, trauma-informed systems rooted in healing and empowerment. She is a graduate of Elevate Academy, an alumna of the Empowered Network, and a member of the Sex Trade Survivor Caucus.
A powerful literary activist and the author of Survivor Soul Speaks, Yasmeen utilizes her poetry as a form of education, liberation, and healing. Her work explores the complexities of trauma, survival in and escape from sex trafficking, recovery and healing. Her work has been published and featured by the University of Washington School of Social Work and Stolen Youth’s 2018 Evening of Hope. She is also a proud graduate of the award-winning writing workshop, The Center for Story and Witness formerly known as The Voices and Faces Project in Chicago. She has performed for many organizations and venues including the Seattle Urban Indian Health Institute, North Seattle Community College, Voices of Community Activist Leaders (VOCAL-WA), Roni Lifeworks Domestic Violence fundraiser, and the Seattle Art Museum. She was the first featured poet at the Seattle Union Gospel Mission Hope Place Women and Children’s Shelter and she’s performed at Sea-Tac Airport for United Through the Arts, a collaboration with United Airlines.
Yasmeen also serves as the Community Outreach and Engagement Specialist for the development of Washington state’s Ebony Alert initiative aimed at improving responses and visibility for missing and exploited Black women and girls. She also facilitates the African American women’s survivor support group at the Organization for Prostitution Survivors (OPS), providing space for healing, empowerment, and sisterhood.
As a certified Sacred Sexual Healer, Yasmeen specializes in feminine health holistic healing, and womb wound healing for women including those with experiences of sexual trauma. Through this sacred practice, she helps women reconnect to their bodies, restore their sacred power, and heal their wombs.
Yasmeen’s work is dedicated to dismantling the systemic silencing of voices that must be heard, nurturing spaces where healing is cultivated with care, empowerment is supported through encouragement and resources, and every experiencer has access to the tools and opportunities to thrive.
Mille
Welcome! My name is Mille and I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. I have had the honor of working with individuals and families through a systemic framework. We are all who we are due to nature and nurture. Family, life experiences, and events happen and we have the power to not only survive but to thrive through them all. I look forward to meeting with you when you’re ready.
Rekina
Rekina Perry is the Executive Director of the Organization for Prostitution Survivors (OPS) and a survivor leader committed to building relationships amongst systems rooted in care, accountability, and justice.
Guided by a strong moral compass, Rekina leads with purposeful, principle-driven action. Her leadership is informed by lived experience and deeply rooted expertise in community engagement and navigating social service systems.
Rekina has served communities at the intersections of exploitation, homelessness, youth services, and behavioral health. Through strategic planning and executive leadership, she has guided OPS through significant growth and intentional change management, expanding survivor-centered programming, strengthening organizational infrastructure, and deepening culturally responsive service models.
Her leadership blends a calm, grounded presence with strategic clarity, ensuring that transitions remain values-aligned and that both staff and survivors are supported through change. Rekina’s work is driven by the belief that systems change must be shaped by those most impacted. She is deeply dedicated to creating pathways for Black and brown survivors to heal, lead, and influence policy.
Through OPS and in collaboration with the STEE network, Rekina champions innovative, community-based approaches that create spaces for healing and advance efforts to end sexual exploitation across Washington State.
Nature
Nature Carter is a Seattle native with deep-rooted knowledge and lived experience grounded in the Black history of prostitution, criminalization, survival, and resistance to systemic underfunding. For more than 25 years, her journey has spanned from the streets to decision-making tables where she now leads, advises, and shapes systems impacting some of the most marginalized communities, including survivors of sexual exploitation and human trafficking.
Nature brings a rare and powerful blend of lived experience, professional expertise, and educational credentials. Her career has been centered in social services and infused with community organizing, program development, administration, health and wellness, mentorship, and systems of change. Her work is guided by a steadfast commitment to culturally responsive, survivor-centered, and justice-driven solutions.
In 2004, Nature co-founded Changes and Empowerment Programs, a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering, educating, building, and strengthening lives for positive change. That same year, she developed and implemented a prevention curriculum for John School and Sex Worker education classes, launching them on-site at Seattle Municipal Court. She also opened House of Change, the first Promise of Hope supportive housing program designed specifically for Survivors of Exploitation and those impacted by addiction.
In August 2005, Nature began leading what is now known as the (SIS) Network, formerly the Prostitution Prevention Network. This network emerged when agencies across King County identified that youth and adults involved in prostitution were significantly underserved. In 2010, SIS evolved into a survivor-led professional network, centering culturally relevant approaches while expanding its mission to include public policy advocacy, improved programming, victim service strategies, and restorative justice initiatives.
Nature continues her tireless crusade by sharing her journey from struggle to success, leading community-based projects, raising public awareness, and serving as a sought-after public speaker. She provides expert counsel to law enforcement, elected officials, and public policymakers at local and state levels. She continues to lead and mentor a team of professionals and survivors to mobilize communities of color, ensuring their voices directly informed recommendations to Washington State’s Statewide Coordinating efforts on Sex Exploitation and Trafficking.
Her work continues today through cross-sector collaboration and the development of Black-led networks, including Stronger Together Ending Exploitation (STEE) and VAST. Nature Carter remains a visionary leader committed to transforming systems and creating pathways to safety, healing, and justice.
LaTanya
I, LaTanya Horace, as the Founder/Executive Director of The Silent Task Force is committed to the creation, coordination, and facilitation of culturally specific educational workshops, trainings and programs that are aimed to heal the systemic impacts of Violence on Black communities. These educational pursuits foster training/workshops for youth and community to empower and address the historical and current dealings of domestic violence, sexual violence, health disparities, education & social justice and promote healthy relationships. I have been a practitioner of trauma informed healing work with youth, families and the community by being an intra-community activist, advocate, organizer and unifier. Through my years of work and compassion for the community, I have engaged in policy reform implementation nationally and locally, strategic planning and outreach.