We begin with St.

Jude's Ranch for Children.

Last year, the Boulder City nonprofit known for helping and housing abused and neglected children expanded its services to include a first of its kind Healing Center for child victims of sex trafficking.

When Nevada Week spoke with its CEO, Christina Vela, she said, Before the center existed, children suspected of being trafficked were sometimes placed in juvenile justice settings, not trauma-informed care.

-So law enforcement would recover a child wherever in our community and take them to the juvenile detention facility and book them in with other young people that are there for crimes that they committed.

So, yeah, that's where girls were ending up.

And maybe for a long time people thought that was the right solution.

-What have you experienced in this year?

-Lots of incredible wins with children one-on-one, these little moments, these little glimmers of hope where you see them start to think different or start to go to our beautiful on-site school and believe that maybe they could graduate from high school or start dreaming about a life free from abuse and neglect.

That's an incredible win.

Some challenges, right?

This first year has not been, you know, beautiful without any problems.

There's been challenges to operationalize a program.

There's challenges to figure out which kids are the right fit for this program.

None of them really want to be here, and we understand.

That's not the standard of success.

We know they would rather be somewhere else.

There's rules here and expectations here.

And if they're used to not living that in their adolescent life, it can sometimes be tough for them.

And yet the wins have been incredible.

We see kids just start to blossom.

-The youngest child you've had here has been how old?

-Thirteen.

-Thirteen.

-Yeah, 13.

-We had talked off camera ahead of this about an article that was written about the grand opening of the center, and some of the children here read that article and took issue with the fact that they were called sex trafficking victims.

-Yep.

-What did they say?

-Yeah.

They said, I'm not a victim.

They don't see themselves as a victim.

They don't believe they're a victim.

Because at some point in their-- In many of them, in their thought process, they believed that the trafficker was somebody who cared about them, that it was my boyfriend or a family member.

And so when you start to rationalize this, you don't see yourself as a victim, and that's a tough place to start when somebody says, I'm not a victim; I don't need the help.

I don't need it.

I don't need to be here.

And we say, Well, okay.

So then we started realizing, like we always knew, they're survivors more than anything.

They're resilient human beings.

That term "victim" threw them off.

And so it reinforced to us how important youth empowerment model is for them to have choice, not necessarily choice to live here because somebody has said they need to live here.

Somebody, an official, has said they need to live here.

But a lot of other built-in choice is what we are very proud of, giving them choice on things that start to empower them, that they can take control.

And little by little or sometimes all at once, they start to admit that they are a victim.

They start to tell us the stories, not by labeling, yes, I'm a victim, but they start to open up and tell us some really painful stories about their lives and their experiences.

And it's in those moments that myself or others get to say, It's incredible that you have survived all that you have.

Some would say you are a victim of abuse or neglect.

And try to help them understand the definition, and then the little light bulb goes off at times like, Oh, okay, yeah, maybe I was a victim and I didn't realize it.

-Just getting to that point is, what, half the battle?

-Yes.

-And then all the healing that comes after that, you would think that some of these children may have to be here for years.

Yeah.

I mean, the journey of recovery is a year.

It's a whole lifetime of recovery.

We think this program does best if they're here for about nine months to a year, and then we want to transition them back into the world.

Now, we have to help make some decisions about what's best for them.

Can they go to a family member?

Can they go somewhere, or do they still need our foster care support services, which is on our other side of our campus, where then they can start to get reintegrated, because we've got to teach them how to live in the world and protect themselves.

If we kept them isolated too long, then maybe we're not preparing them for the future where they have to be out in the real world.

-Is this happening anywhere else in the United States?

-Specifically for the Healing Center?

Not this way.

There are certainly a lot of programs serving trafficking victims, yes.

There are places that have repurposed a home, absolutely, but nothing as comprehensive as what we have created.

We haven't seen anything like it.

And to have a public high school on our campus seems pretty unheard of.

To be quite candid, people across this community, in our own community in Southern Nevada thought, Really?

Do you think you're going to be able to get the school district to build a school on site?

And we thought, well, when there's a will, there's a way.

And I'm so grateful for that partnership.

It has really proven to be an incredible partnership.

-Also when we spoke on the phone, you mentioned, I think, California has reached out to ask whether you can take some of their children.

-Yes, yeah.

-Why?

-There aren't a lot of residential places for child victims.

And when people find us and they realize the holistic, that whole person approach that we have with the school and therapy and homes, I think people are really impressed, because those of us working with this population know it takes a lot of services.

And having them all in one place is really, really helpful.

-Ideally, you would have how many children here at one time?

-Ideally, we'd like to see between 45 and 50 kids at any given time.

-But...?

-But fundraising, we've had a lack of operational funding come in at maybe the rate that we hoped and expected.

We're certainly grateful.

I mean, people have been so incredibly generous to build this place.

This was not an inexpensive project.

This was a $30 million project.

We have not seen, though, the same kind of support on the programmatic side, and that's to be expected.

You know, people want to help build it and then say, okay, now you run it.

It's just been a bit more of a delay than we expected, so we're really proud of the two houses that we have open currently and our investment in getting those houses open, but we need more help.

We're looking for help.

We need help.

-Does that mean you have a wait list of children who could come here?

-We do.

There is a wait list.

We receive referrals on a regular basis.

We get calls from law enforcement.

You know, there's people out every day doing recovery work.

They're out there doing undercover work, trying to find missing and exploited children.

And so we're getting the calls that says, We think we're going to have a 15-year-old come in.

And it's pretty hard right now sometimes to say we don't have the room.

We have the space, we just don't have it in a licensed home because I don't have enough staff yet.

-Last question.

Will you share with our viewers a success story that stands out to you.

-Yeah.

Right now we have a young person who's been here, probably one of the longest.

Maybe not the first resident.

She is doing so good in school.

Her grades are really awesome.

And she was ready for a part-time job, and she actually works on our campus in our job training program earning a paycheck, $15 an hour.

She's receiving job training skills.

So when she's not in school, like in the afternoons or on the weekends, she's working in our job training program.

-Job training programs, okay.

-Here on campus.

She rides her bike.

So right over in front of the house, there's a couple of bikes, and she gets on her bike, she rides to her job.

And her-- The first paycheck she ever received, she said, Take a picture of this-- to the person, her staff that was with her.

She said, I want everybody to know how proud I am of myself.

And that was just absolutely incredible.

-Vela says, so far, the Healing Center has taken in 19 young people.