Selina Higgins, MA, MSW, LCSW-R, United States Army Veteran, has been the inaugural Executive Director of the NYC Administration for Children’s Services’ Office of Child Trafficking Prevention and Policy (OCTPP) since its launch in 2015 as the first office within a NYC public agency dedicated to helping trafficked and at-risk youth. OCTPP coordinates all aspects of policy and practice concerning children involved in human trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation, including identification, assessment, prevention, intervention, safety planning and service coordination for the entire NYC child welfare system. OCTPP also consults with and supports Federal, State, City and community-based agencies, assists in law enforcement recovery operations and coordinates the Safe Harbour Program for New York County. Through Selina’s creative initiatives, OCTPP provides training for professionals and communities, facilitates a variety of groupwork models for youth, coordinates free tattoo removals, provides lived experience “Credible Messenger’ mentorship, hosts a Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C) Awareness project, envisioned and helped develop a cloud-based database through which children are screened for sex trafficking, and maintains a large-scale Child Trafficking Awareness Campaign. Selina has worked in the field of child welfare for over 30 years. She is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW-R) with a Master of Arts in Forensic Psychology, a Master of Social Work, and post-graduate certifications in Infant-Parent Dyadic Therapy and Trauma Assessment, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, Trauma Focused-Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Social Work Administration. Since 2015, she and her training partners have provided trafficking related trainings for over 40,000 attendees, either through conference production or by providing her own original trainings which have been presented at national and international conferences, including multiple workshops at Shared Hope International’s Juvenile Sex Trafficking (JuST) Conferences. She has also developed/co-developed several therapeutic/anti-trafficking groupwork models for youth. Publications include a medical textbook chapter on Human Trafficking in the Foster Care System and the Child Trafficking and What YOU Can Do About it: Tools for NYC Child Welfare Professionals toolkit. You can learn more about the work at https://www.nyc.gov/site/acs/youth/traffickedyouth.page