Breckenridge resident Katie Hilborn knows better than most about the impact being done by groups like Operation Underground Railroad, which is credited as the inspiration behind the film “Sound of Freedom.”

She says she’s been coordinating with the nonprofit since 2015, they’ve provided her with security and she’s helped provide intelligence to them as they go to brothels in India to help recover girls and women that have been brought over from Nuwakot District of Nepal. Still, in an area where five to 10 girls go missing every year, she continues to hope that more people will start looking at ways to help eliminate the need for groups to engage in daring rescues. It’s part of what drives her in her efforts with Global Orphan Prevention — a nonprofit she founded for just such a purpose.

“People always want to fund the rescue, no one wants to fund the prevention,” said Hilborn.

Hilborn’s efforts recently earned her recognition from The Anthem Awards, an award aimed at recognizing positive social impacts, which was launched by the online international awards organization, The Webby Awards. In July, Hilborn earned a silver Humanitarian Leader of the Year award in The Anthem Awards’ nonprofit category.

Hilborn has long been a world traveller with an interest in helping people. In 2011, she collected $3,000 with the aim of establishing some sort of charitable organization. She says she didn’t have any specific ideas about what that would be when she arrived in the country, but gravitated to local orphanages where she learned that a large percentage of the orphans she met had at least one living parent.

She said there were plenty of funds going to help the children and orphanages, but very little work was actually being done to help widowed or abandoned mothers, who often come from lower social castes and have very limited legal and social standing in Nepal. Global Orphan Prevention was started as Hilborn began working to help investing in small enterprises, helping mothers establish livelihoods with farming-based businesses and even helping build a school in eastern Nepal.

It wasn’t until after she went to help deliver aid to remote areas impacted by the devastating 2015 earthquakes, when according to the nonprofit’s website, “the scope of Global Orphan Prevention course-corrected” and they began in earnest to address the conditions that encourage human trafficking. That was the year they began to work towards building the INpowerment Center for Girls, a live-in school that was completed in February 2021 and provides education, life skills and other opportunities for those who access the facility’s offerings.

Hilborn says 70% of trafficking victims in this area of Nepal are illiterate, disempowered or in poverty — often traffickers will offer jobs or an education to convince girls to go willingly, sometimes even with the encouragement of family members.

“The biggest thing is equal access to education, and allowing girls to understand their worth, and that they matter.”

Six girls graduated from the center in April this year, and Global Orphan Prevention is working to expand the center with a goal to expand the building from two to four floors and bring in reliable internet service, which could allow educated women and girls to work remotely — bringing additional funds to the local economy and helping change the conditions that contribute to trafficking in the area.

As she continues to strive to make an impact, Hilborn admits that the work can sometimes be discouraging, especially when there can be a temptation to equate an organizations’s fundraising success to its value and impact. She says external validation from things like The Anthem Awards can help provide motivation as she continues to engage with work that is largely unseen, especially as she says she’s barely scraping by financially.

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“It finally allows me to understand the work I am doing is valuable,” said Hilborn. “… It gives me extra fuel to keep going.”

One other thing that helps keep her going, and keeps Breckenridge her home amid her world travels? The continued support from the community, which once helped her raise $10,000 in one night.

“Everywhere I go in the world, my heart is always with the Summit community because their willingness to come together for the greater good is unprecedented. Nowhere in the Western world have I seen that kind of community involvement,” said Hilborn during a 2015 interview with the Summit Daily. “People really do live like we’re all family, and you just won’t find that in many other cities across the country. Summit has the highest percentage of consciously awake people in any of the places I’ve lived.”

It’s a sentiment she says still rings true all these years later.

“I really want to give a shoutout to those in our community who are helping me to help those girls.”