Ryan Berg

Ryan Berg is the co-founder and CEO of The Aruna Project, a Cincinnati-based athleisure bag and accessories brand stitched entirely by survivors of sex trafficking. With his wife April, he built a hybrid model that fuses a for-profit fashion label with nonprofit holistic care - transitional housing, counseling, healthcare and a living wage - to create what he calls lifelong freedom. The work started after a single TV news brief about children rescued from a brothel sent him hunting for that brothel on a business trip to India, where he found a two-mile stretch holding an estimated 15,000 enslaved women. The Aruna Project says it has helped free and employ more than 160 women across India and the Tri-State and contributed to an 86% drop in trafficking in that part of India.