Joshua Eckstein
- Operations Manager
- Director of Community & grassroots Programs
- Investigative Journalist
Joshua Eckstein is an anti-human trafficking organizer and investigative journalist. His primary journalistic focuses are in labor exploitation, political dysfunction and corruption, and how partisan media and disinformation obfuscate ground-level human harms. He also writes a series called Self-Told Stories, aiming to give an unfiltered platform of advocacy and nuanced personal narrative to individuals in demographics which political leaders of priviliege often speak on behalf of. He comes out of the grassroots direct aid world, his principle background coming in the anti-human trafficking field. He got his start working with survivors of trafficking to build more effective prevention resources on public transit. He then worked internationally, building large scale, grant-free hybrid projects in nomadic East African communities for climate resilience, trafficking prevention, and economic self-determination through transdisciplinary programs in partnership with the Ugandan government and international climate resilience corporations. He's now in the midst of building GrowBlock in Baltimore. The GrowBlock model repurposes abandoned rowhomes as profitable urban farms to generate grant-independent financing for community-based, survivor-led, block by block survivor support and anti-trafficking programs. It uses the forced appreciation of said homes to create alternative high interest banking services for those without access to traditional banking. He's recently been named to the inaugural Next Gen group of the U.S. Alliance To End Human Trafficking, a cutting-edge work group of U.S.-based anti-trafficking advocates aged 18-35, as well as the Baltimore City Human Trafficking Collaborative. He's spoken on several podcasts and shows regarding creative social innovation and the anti-trafficking field before joining the OAS. Eckstein grew up in small town New Hope PA, with a background in farming, backcountry survival instruction, and restaurant work. He's now living in Baltimore full time while attending Johns Hopkins University en route to a B.A. in moral and political economy along with a B.S. in environmental science.