D.L. was “gang-banging” at 14 and fell into a life of stealing and selling her body for money.

She felt like she didn’t have any options.

As a child she was sexually assaulted and found herself in Juvenile Hall at least a half-dozen times. She fell in with the wrong crowd, and ended up hospitalized after getting shot.

Then everything changed.

She was placed at the Olive Crest Hope Refuge campus west of Goleta and her life began to turn around.

High up in the Santa Ynez Mountains, Hope Refuge is a home for formerly sexually trafficked girls between the ages of 12 and 17.

Sally and Chuck Cook founded the facility and later partnered with Olive Crest, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing child abuse and restoring children and families in crisis.

Sally Cook shared the Hope Refuge story at last year’s Santa Barbara Community Prayer Breakfast and is currently in the middle of an $11 million capital campaign to raise funds for renovations and program expansion.

“Hope Refuge is a response to a national crisis, the trafficking of children and women,” she said.

“There are up to 325,000 women and children being trafficked every year here in America.”

Making the situation worse, Cook said, there’s a massive shortage of beds with a specialized program to serve this population.

Hope Refuge was founded in response to the shortage of beds. It’s a short-term, California-licensed residential program with therapists, counselors and clinical services.

The facility serves up to 16 sex trafficking survivors at one time at its 216-acre campus. The Santa Barbara County Social Services and Probation departments refer the girls to the Hope Refuge program.

Each girl’s story is different.

Cook said most girls don’t reveal that they have been sexually trafficked at first. Often, however, they commit crimes as a result of their childhood trauma.

In the course of interviews with social services and probation staff, the stories of trafficking are revealed.

“The behavior can act outward and just look like very dysfunctional behavior, so they end up with petty theft, or running away with cars, hurting people, gang behavior, and they end up in the (Juvenile) Hall,” Cook said.

She and her husband, Chuck, both grew up in Christian families and wanted to share a life of service, but serving sexually trafficked girls was never their plan.

The couple lived in Hollywood and worked in the entertainment industry. One Sunday, they visited a friend’s church and heard a speaker talk about sex trafficking and how the average age of entry is 12 years old.

“It just rocked us,” Cook said. “We went to talk to her afterward and prayed that we heard her wrong. But we hadn’t.”

Through that conversation, they learned about the scale of sex trafficking occurring in plain sight, “under our noses,” she said.

The problem was pervasive.

Human trafficking is estimated to be a $150 billion-a-year global industry, authorities say.

And California consistently leads the nation in the number of human trafficking cases reported to the National Human Trafficking Hotline.

The International Labor Organization estimates that there are more than 24.9 million human trafficking victims worldwide and, of those, 4.8 million are victims of sexual exploitation.

Victims of human trafficking are often young girls and women, according to the organization. Young girls and women are 99.4% of sex trafficking victims and 57.6% of forced labor victims.

“America is now known for being a predator of children,” Cook said. “This is the stuff that should motivate us to act. You can look the other way, but you can never say you didn’t know.”

Coinciding with National Human Trafficking Prevention Month, a new California law took effect Jan. 1 making sex trafficking of minors a serious felony and a “strike” under the state’s Three Strikes law.

Under the new law, repeat traffickers with three strikes would be sent to prison for life.

When the Cooks purchased the bucolic property from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in 2015, there were only about 100 beds available in the entire United States.

They eventually opened the doors to Hope Refuge in 2020 and, in 2022, partnered with Olive Crest to manage it.

Chuck Cook said the location is ideal because it is away from population centers and urban areas.

“It’s in a very remote location,” he said. “These girls tend to run. Having them in a remote location keeps them from running, but after about two-to-four weeks, once they start to build relationships with other girls and staff, and they go to appointments, they don’t run.”

The average length of stay at the facility is 8-10 months.

The Cooks currently are focused on fundraising and development, and leave the day-to-day management to Olive Crest.

They’re currently in the private phase of a capital campaign. Click here for more information or to make an online donation.

“We love to engage people through labor, their influences, finances, their expertise, gift-in-kind, we love to engage people,” Sally Cook said. “It is going to take us all.”

For former client D.L., Hope Refuge changed her life.

“Olive Crest gave me another chance to prove to myself and others that I can be great and turn my life around,” she said.