That is where a Barnabas Group sponsor, Andrew Speicher and the legal team at MSB Law, were able to help. After almost 18 months of working through the legal process, Christine’s entire criminal record, including all felonies and misdemeanors, was expunged with no cost to Christine. She is now free from her criminal past and able to continue building a very successful life, and has a wonderful testimony to share.

Andrew says “We have a heart and a passion at our law firm to give back to the community, especially through using our unique skills as lawyers that allow us to serve our community in specific ways. It has been amazing to see what the Lord has done through our simple willingness to offer these skills for Him to use.” However, Andrew had learned that Christine was just one of many women who needed this kind of help, and felt called to try and make this a scalable initiative to help as many women as possible, here in the KC area and beyond.

Andrew and George began having monthly calls with representatives from REHOPE and Relentless Pursuit, and Andrew’s friend Sarah Jones, a young attorney from the large nationwide law firm Shook, Hardy & Bacon. Their initial goal was to focus just on expunging criminal records of survivors of sex trafficking in Kansas City. But as they explored the issue further, they saw there were many things that had to happen first for a woman to even be considered for having her record expunged.

In most states, a woman has to be clean from drugs and alcohol, and a productive member of society, for at least 3-7 years to even be eligible for expungement. Enter Andrew and the MSB Law team once again! They started brainstorming and realized that the biggest hurdle to providing comprehensive legal help to trafficking survivors was the administrative piece. Another big hurdle was making these survivors even aware of the services available to help them, and thChristian Legal Societyen connecting them with an attorney that was willing to take on their case pro bono.

Through Andrew’s membership and active participation in the Christian Legal Society, he came in contact with The Joseph Project. The Joseph Project’s entire mission is to manage intake and administration for survivors of sex trafficking seeking legal help, and then connect the client to an attorney in their network of “legal first responders” to handle the legal matters for free.

As a result, Andrew has helped form a collaboration between MSB Law, The Joseph Project, Barnabas Group KC, and Shook, Hardy, & Bacon. They are working to train more lawyers to provide pro bono legal representation to women survivors of sex trafficking who need expungements and other legal services, and to spread the word about the legal help available through this collaboration. The program will start with serving survivors with criminal records from Missouri courts near Kansas City, but the goal is to eventually spread word across the country and let women survivors everywhere know there is help available so they can get a fresh start on life.

This is just one example of how a Barnabas Group member was able to use his unique gifts, skills, and experiences to answer God’s call on his life and help transform his community. We are so thankful to each of our members who are putting their unique gifts to work to answer God’s call on their lives and have a positive impact on their communities each day!