With a strong business acumen and love for the Borderland, Nicole Schiff has spent the past six years building an expansive nonprofit network to protect the most vulnerable in this region – victims of sexual exploitation, human trafficking and modern-day slavery.

As the child of a U.S. Marine and a restaurant manager, she grew up in upstate New York, with goals of becoming a doctor.

But heartbreak and turmoil changed that plan, leading to her 2015 arrival in the unlikely desert city of El Paso, a world away from the dreams of her youth.

“When I arrived, I just remember walking out of the airport, and I’d never been this far into Texas,” she recalled. “I saw the mountains, and the mountains were beautiful. I was in awe of them. I just ended up falling in love with El Paso.”

Schiff was married at that time, scouting the area for the future life with her military husband, who had been transferred to Fort Bliss.

This was a path in her life she had never envisioned.

Just a few years before she had achieved her most coveted goal: acceptance into Penn State to study medicine.

“I had already gone and visited the dorms, and was ready to go,” she said.

But then news came that her mother was severely injured in a car accident.

Bedridden and in a back brace, her mother required 24-hour in-home care, so Schiff withdrew from college and remained home to care for her mother.

“I want to say it was challenging but it really wasn’t,” Schiff said. “We were so close, and our family was so close. The decision between taking care of my mom or going to school, of course my mom was going to come first.”

Sitting at her desk as the executive director of the Paso del Norte Center of Hope, she surmised that setback, and others that followed, as part of the journey that led to her calling as a voice and protector of the vulnerable in El Paso.

“Everything happens for a reason,” she said.

She helped her mother recover and attended night school at the local community college, earning an associate’s degree, then pursuing a nursing degree.

Upon her arrival to El Paso, she landed a job at the El Paso Child Guidance Center, where she forged lifelong professional and personal relationships, she said.

After a brief relocation to Georgia, she returned to El Paso as the leader of the Center of Hope, and since 2020 has built the nonprofit up from a $345,000 annual budget to nearly $1 million and expanded its staff from five to 14.

In a conversation with El Paso Inc., Schiff shared some of her story, and her mission to protect people, primarily children, from the dangers of exploitation.

Q: In high school, would you consider yourself to have been high-achieving or were you more of a mainstream student?

My brother would say I was the nerd of the family. I did basketball. I did gymnastics, volleyball and cheerleading.

I helped on a political campaign for our local mayor at the time because my goal obviously was to go to Penn State and get somewhere big.

In school, especially my junior and senior year, I tried to be as involved as possible. I graduated in the top 10% of my high school class, so I think I tried hard with grades as much as possible.

I was very, very active. I ran for student council president.

Q: Did you win?

Yes, my junior year.

Q: After your mom’s accident, you spent eight months taking care of her and withdrew from Penn State. But you kept going to school at night. What was that like?

I just stayed the course at that point. Things had just changed and I was like, “you know what? Maybe I just wasn’t supposed to go to Penn State.”

Q: You get your associates degree, then what happens?

I started working at a local hospital, working the night shift, doing ER registration. I thought maybe I wanted to work in a hospital setting. I had already been taking care of my mom. So I ended up going to Elmira College, which is in my hometown.

I became a nursing assistant while I was at the hospital, and then just kind of went through there.

I also went back to school for healthcare administration.

Q: When you moved to El Paso with your husband, at that time, did you have a job lined up?

No. We moved here and the goal was to get a job. I came down first actually alone; he was still in training. I came, got the house, got all of our household goods delivered. I was here for about three weeks, and I interviewed with the El Paso Child Guidance Center.

I interviewed with Cathy Gaytan, and she hired me on the spot.

Q: Coming into El Paso, what were your first impressions?

The funny story was I came in on April Fool’s Day. I flew here on April 1, 2015, I’ll never forget. When my parents were taking me to the airport, my dad was so mad. He tried to convince me that I would hate El Paso. He had come down here in the 1980s as a Marine so he’s like, “there’s tarantulas everywhere, and snakes, and you’re gonna hate it.”

And I’m like, “all right dad, you know it’s because your baby girl is leaving.” I was his only daughter, and I was moving across the country.

That day, he was like, “this is the worst April Fool’s joke ever.”

Q: You stayed at the Child Guidance Center for five years, helping build it up. Then you went through a divorce and moved to Georgia. What was it like making that move out of El Paso?

I remember standing in the parking lot with Cathy, the CEO of the Guidance Center, and we’re both just bawling.

Q: Why was it so hard to leave?

I had grown into my role. Leaving the Guidance Center was really, really hard for me. Because when I moved here, I didn’t know anybody at all.

I had grown so much at the Guidance Center and I had fallen so much in love with that mission that it was a part of me. I had become a new person, I guess you could say. I had grown out of New York.

Q: Did you feel you were an El Pasoan at that point?

Yes. I had made strong friends here, like some who felt like family already, inviting me to Christmas, Thanksgiving, all those different things. I did really feel a connection to El Paso. I felt more at home here than when I was up in New York. I felt more growth, and so going to Georgia, it was like starting all over again. I didn’t really want to leave.

Q: You didn’t stay in Georgia for long, about a year. Then you returned to El Paso. How did that happen?

I missed El Paso so much, the friends I had made here, the environment here, the people, everyone is so kind. In Georgia, it was not the same. People were not as friendly; it was so humid. I was uncomfortable. I just wasn’t happy, and I just wasn’t fulfilled the way I was at the Guidance Center. I just had this strong pull to go back to El Paso.

I was like, “you know what? I’m gonna start looking to see if there’s anything back in El Paso.” I put it out to a few friends, “hey, if you know of anything in El Paso, I’d be interested in looking or applying or going back.”

Sure enough, a friend of mine, she used to sit on the board at Center of Hope, and she told me the director was leaving. I did a remote interview and they basically were like, “How soon can you come back to El Paso?”

Q: And how did that feel?

I couldn’t wait. I packed up a 15-foot moving truck. My car was on a trailer on the back, and it was me and the dog and a cat, and we drove back. I couldn’t get back fast enough.

It was emotional because I was also leaving the relationship I had, so I’m leaving him in Georgia. But to me, it was going back to El Paso again for a fresh start, a new job, and just getting to start over. It was like I was going home again.

Q: That was June of 2020 when you got back to El Paso. Was the Center of Hope a smaller operation back then?

Yes, that was the other thing. The board had told me in the interview that they were in a tight spot. They had lost a big federal grant, and their executive director had left.

They tell me, “If you don’t bring in grant money and funding, we will close within a year. Do you want that challenge”

And I was like, “yes, challenge accepted.”

Q: Wow, no hesitation. What brought that confidence?

I think the Guidance Center. When I became the Director of Operations there, I had learned how to write state grants, federal grants and then I was actually responsible for implementing those grants at the Guidance Center. I felt confident I could write them, and that I could then implement them.

Q: From that time, is it accurate to say that each year the Center of Hope has been gaining strength?

Yes, each year. First, it was myself and four, and then the next year we brought in one or two more and brought in a little more money. Each year we have grown a little bit, strategically.

Q: So you all have grown, have more money and more capacity. What’s your role in the community?

The Paso del Norte Center of Hope opened in 2013. The mission of the center was to serve victims of human trafficking. Initially it started because they were identifying female adult victims in the emergency shelters.

They were seeing women who were being trafficked, but there was no agency in town that was serving that population.

We’re now working a lot with minors. Our average client age right now is actually 14.

It could be labor trafficking, sex trafficking and then the big one now is child exploitation, online communications with adults and minors, child pornography. We now call it child sexual abuse material, CSAM.

That’s our focus, that’s our mission. And with that population, we provide advocacy, case management, therapy, we have a full-time therapist on staff, we help with finding shelter. We have rental assistance, hygiene, clothing, anything you can think of that somebody needs, that’s where we meet them.

Q: You mentioned that there’s an average age of 14 since you all started in 2013. The average age of exploited women and girls has been dropping?

The biggest thing I can relate it to, even nationally, is technology. During COVID, kids were home with a laptop, potentially a cell phone, internet, and when parents were out working, kids were home with potentially free reign of the internet.

The biggest thing for me is social media. That is where predators find youths. The more kids have it, the younger they are, the bigger the threat.

Even Roblox (online gaming and creation platform) is geared towards 3- to 8-year-olds, and Roblox was a target for predators to go after minors.

Q: Considering that threat, what should parents have in mind when they allow children to access social media and online gaming apps?

We have girls and boys being targeted. I’d say about 30% of our population that we’re serving is young boys. So for boys and girls, it’s through video game chats, Instagram, things like that.

Sometimes girls are trying to build up their following and they’re accepting whoever’s inviting them to follow them, but they don’t know them.

Kids think, “Oh, I have 10,000 followers now.” But how many of those do you actually know? So then people are messaging them. What we see a lot of times is these kids are vulnerable.

Sometimes we see the person saying, “I can be a father figure to you.” That’s how it starts. Then they slowly build this relationship with them. Like, “I care about you. Nobody else cares about you. Your parents are working a lot, you’re lonely at home.”

And they’re building this rapport with them. That’s when it turns into a sexual nature, like, “oh, send me a photo. Now send me another photo.”

We see it slowly build.

Q: Specifically, what should parents be looking out for, in terms of warning signs?

Parents need to know who their kids are talking to. Pay attention to what apps they’re using. Are they on their phone 24/7? Are they on their phone late at night? Are they going into their room and shutting the door? What pictures are on their phone, whether they’ve taken them or received them?

The cell phones are the biggest thing. If a youth is attached to that cell phone and doesn’t want you to look at it, is hiding it, that’s a concern.

If they have two cell phones, that’s a huge red flag, because that means somebody gave them access to another phone on purpose, to track them.

Those are all indicators that they’re probably talking to somebody.

Don’t get me wrong, they could be talking to friends, it could be completely harmless, but parents need to be mindful.

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Q&A: Nicole Schiff, executive director of Paso del Norte Center of Hope