Boston-based teen counselor is national award recipient

Is 1 of 80 to be recognized by Petra Foundation

When Audrey Porter goes into group homes with her 10-session curriculum aimed at keeping the most vulnerable adolescent girls from sexual exploitation and prostitution, she meets girls who are skeptical, resistant, and given to rolling their eyes. So before she starts the lessons, she tells her story.

"I'm a survivor," said Porter, who was manipulated into Boston's sex trade at age 16 by someone she thought was her boyfriend. She spent the next 15 years ensnared in what she calls "the life": prostitution, drug addiction, and sexual exploitation.

Porter's story gets the girls listening, but it is her compassionate, frank, and never judgmental nature that draws people to open up and makes her so effective at what she does, said Lisa Goldblatt Grace, who nominated Porter for a Petra Foundation fellowship.

Goldblatt Grace is director of the My Life My Choice Project, the prostitution prevention program run through The Home for Little Wanderers.

The national honor, which was awarded last night in a ceremony at the Newseum in Washington, recognizes unsung leaders who toil for the rights, autonomy, and dignity of others.

The nearly 80 recipients in the 20 years of the honor, named for civil rights scholar Petra Tölle Shattuck, include community organizers, educators, doctors, and documentarians who have done front-line work in fields such as immigrant rights, prison reform, and environmental justice.

"What I love about this is, most of these recipients, we're not just people who haven't been through anything," said Porter, 46, who began as a volunteer speaker about five years ago with My Life My Choice and now works as the program's assistant director. She was quick to credit the program's cofounders: Goldblatt Grace, a clinical social worker, and Denise Williams, a friend who had also escaped the streets and encouraged Porter to help counsel others.

In her current role, Porter leads 10-week education programs with groups of at-risk girls, mentors victims, and trains and counsels other survivor- educators.

Along with Goldblatt Grace, Porter also has instructed a long list of law enforcement officers, Department of Children and Families and Department of Youth Services staff, healthcare providers, juvenile defense lawyers, probation officers, judges, and many others on how to understand and support sexually exploited adolescent girls.

My Life My Choice has become a national model studied and replicated in other cities, including Minneapolis and San Diego.

"What Audrey does is invaluable," Goldblatt Grace said, calling Porter an inspiration and a leader. "We really believe that this whole movement, and this work, has to be led by a survivor's voice. And she combines an incredible ability to be insightful and caring and compassionate with adolescent girls and a real sense of the issue in a global way."

In the group sessions, Porter, who has been recovering from the life for 15 1/2 years, talks to girls about the dangers of street life and the false promises and tricks that pimps use to lure them, and she counsels them on topics such as sexual health and the connection between substance abuse and prostitution. And she listens.

Porter said she once thought she would never escape the coercion, substance abuse, violence, and false esteem of street life, under pimp control. Today, she is sometimes overwhelmed thinking that she has emerged from devastation, to survive and help others, she said.

"I don't forget where I come from, but I'm really trying to work past that, because I think now my purpose is . . . to do the work that I do," she said last evening in a telephone interview.

This year's fellows, who each receive a $7,500 stipend, were to be honored last night at a ceremony in which Samantha Power, the human rights activist and Pulitzer Prize winner, was slated to give the keynote address.

Goldblatt Grace, in an interview before the ceremony, said she planned to introduce Porter by quoting from one of the letters written by girls Porter has counseled.

In the letters, the girls called Porter a mother-figure and thanked her for having the courage to connect with them.

"She taught me how to love myself for who I became and not for who I was," she read from one. "She has helped me to know that life can only get better, and I should follow my dreams and never give up."