We are so excited to be featuring Candy Factory member Bethany Smith Woodcock of Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) this week on The Sugar. When she is not busy running a non-profit and helping others, she is working hard to make our coworking community better.  From helping to keep an eye on Groundworks to taking part in member events and workshops, she goes above and beyond. Her passion for community engagement is contagious, and she shows us each day how coworking can work for non-profits as well as other businesses.

A little more about Bethany:

Bethany  is the founder of Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY), a Lancaster, PA based organization that focuses on raising awareness about modern day slavery and helping individuals and groups to understand how they can make a difference. Her passion to abolish human trafficking began while helping to set up a refugee camp in Eastern Europe during the 1999 war in Kosovo. Bethany saw the issue of human trafficking from two perspectives; the first through the eyes of a woman who had been trafficked to a brothel in Italy through a promise of work and the second through the eyes of a trafficker who had abducted children for the Albanian mafia. Once returning to the U.S. Bethany quickly learned that trafficking is a part of our daily lives, it just looks different in different parts of the world. Her hope for NIMBY is that it would mobilize ordinary citizens into action against the monster of human trafficking in their own backyards.

In addition to NIMBY, Bethany is the Coordinator for the Lancaster Winter Women’s Shelter, located at the YWCA during the winter months, co-chairs the Lancaster CASE Task Force, a county government initiative in conjunction with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children that focuses on child molestation, trafficking, prostitution and child abuse images and serves as the Pennsylvania State Advocacy Leader for the International Justice Mission.

Bethany has two grown sons and lives in Paradise with her husband, Robert.

About NIMBY

“Not In My Back Yard is a grassroots organization dedicated to ending human trafficking in our own back yards and beyond. NIMBY partners with law enforcement, legislators, and abolitionists to alleviate the suffering of those victimized by human trafficking.”