April 08, 2026
Amanda Dempson '26
Victoria Erdel Garcia ’19 was known on campus as the girl obsessed with fighting trafficking. She was drawn to the issue because victims’ stories rarely sustained attention — and too often elicited only sympathy. For Erdel Garcia, change has to go further than that. She just had to find a way to get people to listen. So, she started a podcast.
In 2017, the summer before her junior year at Notre Dame, Erdel Garcia started The Trafficking Dispatch, a four-season podcast featuring interviews with activists and survivors of trafficking. The podcast had short episodes targeted at college-aged students who could listen during their busy days, and the episodes covered all forms of trafficking, from sex trafficking to labor trafficking, organ harvesting, child soldiers, and more.
The platform Erdel Garcia had created reached beyond campus and to survivors who wanted to share their stories, most of Erdel Garcia’s guests being people who reached out to her. During her time, she interviewed several survivors, and, in one case, a former trafficker.
“I wanted to show that there are real people, real stories behind all these atrocities,” Erdel Garcia said. “I feel like a lot of times people spread awareness, and then they just stop. I really wanted to equip people with information that would actually compel them to act.”
Sharing survivors’ stories comes with great responsibility — something Erdel Garcia admitted made her nervous at first. She wasn’t sure how to approach such sensitive material. In those early moments, she held onto a quote from professor and activist Su’ad Abdul Khabeer: “You don’t have to be a voice for the voiceless, you just have to pass the mic.”
Erdel Garcia tries to live by that idea and has been since she was young, starting simply with paying attention.
Erdel Garcia was born in Bremen, Indiana, but soon after her birth her parents moved the family to Portugal. Both Ecuadorian-American, her parents worked as missionaries and taught in international schools. She credits her early exposure to different cultures with shaping her sense of cultural awareness.
It was before she started kindergarten when her family returned to the United States and officially settled in Mishawaka, where she spent most of her childhood. She first visited Notre Dame’s campus at six years old.
“I obviously was too young to understand college and Notre Dame’s reputation and academic rigor, but I just remember seeing all the Gothic architecture and how much it reminded me of Portugal,” she said. “I felt at home from the first time I visited campus, and when we were leaving, I told my parents I was going to go there someday.”
Later, when Erdel Garcia was thirteen, the founder of the Starfish Project — a non-profit jewelry organization that employs and supports women escaping trafficking and exploitation in Asia — visited her church to speak about the group’s mission.
“In school, I was always taught that slavery was a thing of the past, but this was the first time that I heard of human trafficking and how it is still an ongoing issue,” Erdel Garcia said.
This sudden awareness of an issue so pervasive yet largely unspoken stuck with her, quietly shaping the direction of her studies until it eventually became her focus. She wanted to understand trafficking more deeply and resolved to be part of the solution.
Erdel Garcia was accepted to Notre Dame through the QuestBridge Scholars Program. She initially began on the pre-health track, imagining she’d work in the medical field, before switching to sociology and adding a minor in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL).
“I knew that I wanted to help other people. I just didn’t know how to do that,” she said. “The only job that immediately came to mind was a doctor.”
Her academic interests shifted when she realized her heart was in the humanities and that there are countless ways to help people across disciplines, some of which she had already encountered.
By her sophomore year, she had her sights set on working for Starfish Project and reached out to the organization’s CEO to ask about internship opportunities.
At the time, she was hoping for a remote position and had no plans of leaving Indiana. But that changed when she was offered an internship in East Asia.
With the help of Notre Dame grants, Erdel Garcia spent the summer of 2018 in East Asia with the Starfish Project, immersing herself in a new culture while building relationships with survivors. She got to meet women where they were and listened to their stories firsthand.
“I really had a great time exploring a new culture, taking all their public transportation,” she said. “It was amazing, but there were also heavy moments.”
When she returned to Notre Dame, Erdel Garcia immersed herself even more deeply in studying human trafficking, now informed not only by survivors’ stories but also by having witnessed the circumstances they endured.
By her senior year, her podcast had reached listeners in 100 countries. It also led to an invitation to present at the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize Forum. The podcast was later featured in the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network’s 2018 Youth Solutions Report under the Sustainable Development Goal of Peace and Justice.
Even as her work took her beyond South Bend, Erdel Garcia stayed grounded in campus life. A proud Pasquerilla West resident for all eight semesters, she found a home in the dorm’s community. She also tutored in the Writing Center, drawing on her TESOL minor to support international students.
Additionally, she served as a research assistant in the Kellogg International Scholars Program, working under former history and Africana studies professor Mariana Candido to study the historical roots of human trafficking and slavery in Angola. She carried that work into her senior honors sociology thesis, which examined human trafficking in Asia.
By graduation, it seemed everything was lining up for Erdel Garcia to return to Starfish — this time not as an intern, but as a full-time English teacher. She had even spent her senior year studying trauma-informed teaching methods in preparation for the role. But a week before graduation, visa laws changed, and she was suddenly no longer eligible.
Instead, Starfish offered her a different position in marketing and social media. In the role, she helped generate content about the organization’s products while telling survivors’ stories in a trauma-informed and sensitive way, focusing on their journeys rather than their traumatic pasts.
“In a kind of unplanned way, running that podcast in college really helped prepare me for that role, so I kind of had this informal training. My thesis was also about how we present topics of human trafficking on social media, so it all accidentally prepared me for that exact role,” she said.
Though her job was different from what she had originally planned, Erdel Garcia eventually rose to an e-commerce senior manager position and found the work deeply fulfilling.
“I know advertising is all about sales, but at the end of the day, it was different at this company. At this company, every sale quite literally directly leads to hiring more women,” Erdel Garcia said. “It was really motivating to be able to see a number and then know exactly how many women would be able to change their own lives because of it.”
However, six months into her role at Starfish, the pandemic upended everything. Erdel Garcia returned to Mishawaka and began working remotely as the company weathered financial strain. To make extra income — and because she genuinely loved it when she was on campus —she picked tutoring back up.
Around that same time, she was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The diagnosis helped her understand her own academic journey and inspired her to support students who struggled in similar ways.
“I felt like a lot of things in my life started making sense retroactively, and I started reflecting back on my time, specifically working at the Writing Center at Notre Dame,” she said.
Many of the students who came to her had ADHD, and she’d used the techniques that had worked for her, not yet realizing she had it, too. After her diagnosis, she felt better equipped to support her students, now understanding more fully the challenges they faced.
“I started working with students and professionals who had ADHD or autism, just helping them communicate their own ideas clearly,” Erdel Garcia said. “It was something I started doing, honestly, out of survival at first, but then, over time, it just became this thing that I kept doing and still do to this day.”
After nearly five and a half years at Starfish and tutoring on the side, Erdel Garcia began craving something in-person — and a change of scenery. She left the organization and moved to Memphis, Tennessee. In Sept. 2024, she joined financial planning and wealth management firm Fish and Associates as a client services associate. Her long-term goal is to become a certified financial planner.
Fish and Associates’ mission is similar to Starfish Project in that they aim not only to support their clients financially but to equip them for long-term stability and success. As a women-owned and operated firm, they focus on serving the underserved, particularly women and members of the LGBTQ community.
Though the field may seem different, Erdel Garcia sees a clear overlap between her past and present work — particularly when it comes to financial empowerment.
“I want to help women,” she said. “My core mission is to help women achieve financial literacy, so that they can achieve financial freedom.”
It is important to Erdel Garcia that she carries the same morals and values with her, no matter the role.
Looking back on her own experiences, she encourages current Notre Dame students to lean into the resources and opportunities the University provides.
“If you want to make your little slice of the world a better place, Notre Dame has so many connections and so many opportunities to help you do that,” she said. “Don’t shy away from finding those opportunities because I promise you they exist.”
Originally published by Amanda Dempson '26 at weare.nd.edu,
a digital publication from the Notre Dame Alumni Association telling stories of Domers doing good in the world, on March 03, 2026.
Posted In
- Undergraduate
- Departments
- Alumni
Notre Dame launches minor in Earth and planetary sciences with focus on space exploration
June 08, 2026
Rising senior Katharine Steffes awarded Beinecke Scholarship for graduate study
June 05, 2026
Eighteen Latino Studies students participate in Cross Cultural Leadership Program this summer
May 25, 2026