Chris Simonsen joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as they explore how communities can close the gap that makes young people vulnerable to trafficking—not with rescue mentalities, but with trauma-informed care, consistent relationships, and spaces where young people feel safe enough to stay.

Chris Simonsen

Chris Simonsen is the Chief Executive Officer of Orangewood Foundation, one of Orange County’s leading organizations serving youth who have experienced abuse, neglect, homelessness, and exploitation. With more than fifteen years at the helm and over three decades of executive leadership experience, Simonsen oversees a comprehensive continuum of care that includes housing, education, transitional support, wellness services, and specialized programs for youth who have been exploited or trafficked. Under his leadership, Orangewood has expanded its focus on intervention for children and Transitional Age Youth (TAY), emphasizing strategies that prevent revictimization, stabilize immediate crises, and strengthen long-term resilience. Simonsen’s leadership is shaped by a commitment to relationship-based, trauma-informed care and a theory of change rooted in the belief that consistent adult support, safe environments, and practical resources dramatically alter a young person’s trajectory.

Key Points

• Orangewood Foundation made a strategic decision ten years ago to remove all labeling criteria for their programs, allowing them to serve any teen or young adult in need regardless of foster care status or county of residence, which caused the organization to grow from 40 to 250 employees.


• The number one priority when working with vulnerable youth is building a trusting relationship and creating a safe environment where they feel comfortable, which can take weeks or months before meaningful goal-setting work can begin.


• Young people without support structures are highly vulnerable to traffickers, and their trauma is so much more complex that Orangewood created dedicated programming including the Lighthouse transitional housing program and Project Choice drop-in center specifically for survivors and at-risk youth.


• Prevention work must address the developmental realities of youth who haven’t had long-term stability or supportive infrastructure, including implementing social-emotional support in schools through programs like advisory groups that stay together for four years.


• The role of loneliness and connection is critical—young people need to build their own communities and peer support networks, not just rely on organizational staff, to develop healthy relationships and long-term resilience.


• For those wanting to help, the most effective approach is to support existing trauma-informed organizations through volunteering, donations, or collaboration rather than starting new nonprofits, and to get educated on what human trafficking really is before attempting direct intervention.


• Schools need to dedicate more resources to the social-emotional aspects of teenagers’ lives, not just academics, and provide direct education to students about trafficking prevention at appropriate age levels without parental pushback.


• The Ending Human Trafficking Collaborative led by the Samueli Foundation exemplifies how community education and cross-sector partnerships can strengthen prevention efforts by bringing together experts and philanthropists to direct resources where they’re most needed.

Resources

• Orangewood Foundation


• Samueli Academy


• Project Choice (Orangewood Foundation)


• Lighthouse Transitional Housing Program (Orangewood Foundation)


• Ending Human Trafficking Podcast


• Global Center for Women and Justice – Vanguard University


• Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force


• Samueli Foundation

Transcript

[00:00:00 ] Chris Simonsen: The number one thing we have to do initially with any of our young people is build a trusting relationship with them.

[00:00:07 ] Make them feel comfortable.

[00:00:09 ] Delaney: When young adults don’t have safe housing, trusted adults, or a sense of belonging, prevention fails and traffickers step in to fill that gap. This episode explores how communities can close the gap, not with rescue mentalities, but with trauma-informed care, consistent relationships and spaces where young people feel safe enough to stay.

[00:00:30 ] You’ll hear why prevention often starts long before exploitation is visible, and how schools, nonprofits, and everyday adults can be a part of the solution. Hi, I’m Delaney. I’m a student here at Vanguard University and I help produce this show. Today, Sandie talks with Chris Simonsen, CEO of Orangewood Foundation about how supporting transitional age youth and building community-based responses can reduce vulnerability to trafficking.

[00:00:57 ] And now here’s their conversation.

[00:01:06 ] Sandie Morgan: Chris, I am so grateful to have you on the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast. Welcome.

[00:01:12 ] Chris Simonsen: Happy to join you, Sandie. It’s nice to be here.

[00:01:16 ] Sandie Morgan: We have known each other a pretty long time, and I think one of the highlights in my career was when Orangewood and you in particular, gave me the Crystal Vision Award and I just want to do a thankful shout out for what that meant. So many of us have worked in this space for a long time, and we often do not stop to reflect on our achievements.

[00:01:50 ] I have the feeling we need to find a way to give you that award.

[00:01:56 ] Chris Simonsen: Well, who knows? Maybe that’ll happen someday after I’m retired.

[00:02:00 ] Sandie Morgan: Oh, okay. Well we can’t let that happen too soon. So, let’s provide some context because we know each other well, but for our listeners here, what is the mission of Orangewood?

[00:02:16 ] Chris Simonsen: Yeah, so Orangewood Foundation has been around actually 45 years, this year. And it started out with just one project, which was to collaborate with the county of Orange to build an emergency shelter for foster youth. At the time they had a facility, but it intermingled foster youth that were there on an emergency basis with probation youth.

[00:02:41 ] And so it was quite confusing for these young children that were removed from their homes on a temporary basis to be mixed in with these other children that had committed crimes. So the director at the time, Bill Steiner, went to the county and said I’d like to create a separate facility to house these children that have been removed from their homes until we can find them a suitable placement.

[00:03:07 ] So the county had a piece of land, but they didn’t have any funds to build the facility, so that’s when General William Lyon, who founded our organization, got involved and rallied the community to raise $8 million. And five years later they opened up the Orangewood Children’s Home and turned that over to the county to operate and run.

[00:03:30 ] And they’ve been doing that ever since for the last 40 years. So then our board asked themselves, well, what more could we do? We’ve got all this momentum in the community and awareness around the challenges of foster care and child abuse that’s going on in the county. So they decided to start creating other programs.

[00:03:52 ] And so we’ve been doing that over the last 40 years. We started with a scholarship program for former foster youth that wanna pursue higher education. And that’s a significant program because only about 60% of foster youth graduate high school and only about 20% attempt college and only about six to 8% finish college.

[00:04:13 ] So one of the barriers for them finishing college is financial. So we try to assist them so that some of the things that maybe parents would provide a young adult as they’re going to college is something that we can provide them. And then we just continued to build on that. We created some transitional housing programs.

[00:04:32 ] We run the county’s independent living program for teens in foster care. And when we moved to our new facility in 2003, we created a drop-in center for young adults that are struggling with homelessness or have any other needs. And that program has really grown and expanded to the point where we are serving over 1200 young adults in our drop-in center this year.

[00:04:56 ] And about 10 or so years ago, we made a strategic decision to remove all the labeling of our young people. We had a lot of internal criteria of how young people could qualify for our programs. A lot of it around having been in foster care in Orange County, and that just really was not inclusive and we were turning away young people that really needed help.

[00:05:21 ] So we did away with all of that criteria. And so today we just serve any teen or young adult in need. It doesn’t matter if they’re from Orange County or somewhere else in the state or even out of state. We’ve got a lot of resources to assist them and we want to be there for them. So that was a pretty fundamental shift for us, but I think a really smart and good one, and that has caused us to grow as an organization.

[00:05:48 ] I’ve been with Orangewood 18 years now, six years as the Chief Financial Officer, and now 12 years as the CEO. And we had 40 employees when I started back in 2007, and now