Governor Awards Support Program

The program plans to launch Project CASE: Campaign Against Sexual Exploitation, a multi-year program designed to decrease the incidence of youth coerced or lured into child sexual exploitation and to provide rehabilitation services for women and girls who have been victimized.

Project CASE hopes to enhance the quality, depth, and coordination of outreach and case management services, strengthen training for professionals working with women, and provide age-appropriate prevention education and community awareness programs.

The program aims to find solutions to the health, financial, educational, legal and emotional problems of children and young women, empower youth, educate the general public, and encourage women to become public advocates.

“The Paul and Lisa Program has been an unqualified success in program and policy development regarding sexual exploitation of youth and women for nearly 25 years. These funds will help the program to continue to remove victims of exploitation from the streets,” Rell said.

The Paul and Lisa Program was founded in 1980 when current president Frank Barnaba met a young woman named Lisa who was crying at a diner.

Frank found out she was crying because she was forced by her boyfriend to go into prostitution. Lisa found the will to leave the streets with help from Frank and others.

However, Lisa had told her pimp she was leaving and her desire to help other women in similar situations but before she did, Lisa was found dead of a questionable overdose.

Her death motivated Frank, several other volunteers, and Saint Paul’s Church to form The Paul and Lisa Program.