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Senior aims to break Guinness record, raise awareness for human trafficking

On Saturday, public relations senior Cody Miller will attempt to break the Guinness world record for the most holes of disc golf played in a 24 hour period.

Miller is attempting to break the record in order to raise awareness and money for the Houston Rescue and Restore Coalition, a Houston organization that aims to prevent human trafficking.

“I am a part of Houston Lutheran Campus Ministry, and a big focus point to us is human trafficking and we have had HRRC come speak with us,” Miller said. “I kind of developed a passion for it, and I wanted this record to benefit someone so I thought they were a good fit.”

Currently, the record stands at 1,310 holes, but Miller plans on reaching 1,800. Starting at 9 a.m. he will be playing at Bobby Ford Park, a nine-hole course where he’ll have volunteers handing him a new disk at every course, as well as keeping score and videotaping the event.

“I decided I wanted to break the record when I first played the course in February,” Miller said.  “I knew the course was short enough for the record to be broken at that particular one.”

During a Department of Justice Human Trafficking Conference in 2006, I-10 was identified as one of the main routes of human traffickers in the United States. During that same year, the Department of Health and Human Services found that 25 percent of all certified human trafficking victims were in Texas, and a majority of those were located in Houston.

“I heard stories from one of my friends, who suffered through this,” Miller said. “I felt like I should do something. I also have been interested in breaking the Guinness world record for disc golf. It made sense that I should try to combine these two goals.”

Darrell Johnson, the director of development and boy’s prevention programming at HRRC said that human trafficking is modern-day slavery, and that their organization takes a unique approach to ending human trafficking.

“We feel that preventing human trafficking in the first place is the best way to combat it,” Johnson said. “We speak a lot to front-line professionals such as firemen, police men, and social workers. We also go into schools, so that we can talk about the dangers of vulnerability.”

HRRC was founded in 2005 in a garage, and has since established September as the city-wide Human Trafficking Awareness Month as well as training over 26,000 people on the issue of human trafficking.

“We’ve grown from two people in a garage having to over 15 coalition members with partnerships with churches and government agencies,” Johnson said.

To date, Miller has raised $1,370 using Indiegogo, and will continue to take donations until Friday.

“This record has a lot of hype and support from my family and friends, so the most important thing is for the record to be broken,” Miller said. “I can break the record by having a lot of support from people by coming out.”

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