Shandra Woworuntu

Shandra Woworuntu is an international advocate and leader in the fight of human trafficking. She is a motivational and inspirational speaker in raising awareness about human rights. Shandra trains law enforcement, attorneys, social workers, medical practitioners, and businesses and lectures university students across the country and internationally.

Shandra was a banker and money market trader in Indonesia, her native country. Escaping political turbulence and religious persecution, Shandra expanded her employment to the U.S., where she was kidnapped and sold into an underground sex business in New York and surrounded areas. She escaped and collaborated with law enforcement to arrest the traffickers. Shandra learned from her experiences and used it to help victims and survivors. She founded Mentari to mentor and empower survivors of trafficking in their reintegration into society independently.

As a lobbyist, Shandra has testified at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings, New York City budget hearings to raise funding for services and lobbied federal/state bills as they passed and became laws. Shandra was a New Jersey State commissioner and she has been appointed by Barack Obama to be the founding member of the First U.S. Advisory Council on Human Trafficking to the Presidential Integration Task Force in 2015. Shandra is the 2017 National Honoree of L’Oréal Paris Women of Worth.