It’s difficult to get precise numbers, but it’s estimated that in the United States alone, there are thousands of victims of child sex trafficking every year.
A 2017 study done by Arizona State University tracked over 1,400 arrests from 2010 to 2015 that spanned the local, state, and federal levels. Those numbers are climbing, too; the United States Department of Justice lists a 17 percent increase in child-only cases from 2019 to 2020.
Getting a handle on the global numbers is even more daunting, and the problem is much worse. The United Nations estimates that 20 percent of trafficking cases worldwide involve children, and in some parts of the world — like West Africa — they make up the majority. A sobering thought, given that according to the U.N. data that spans 155 countries, sexual exploitation is the most common form of trafficking, at nearly 80 percent.
It’s a global issue that harms the world’s most vulnerable, and right at the front lines of the efforts to fight child sex trafficking are Matthew and Ashley Boyd.
In rural Uganda, they are the co-founders of Kingdom Home, a 14-acre compound that gives at-risk children a place to live in order to prevent the spread of child trafficking in that country. It is a home for boys and girls, currently ranging in age from 6 to 16, where they have access to an education and are being raised in an environment where they can one day live independently and avoid being swallowed up by traffickers.
“A child that doesn’t have a voice, who has an innocence, and that innocence can be taken away,” Matthew told CHGO. “A child, regardless of what is happening, should never go through that. So it’s one of those things where it’s like, ‘How can we break this?’”
The seeds for Kingdom Home were sown years ago, long before Matthew was a major leaguer. He and his wife Ashley met at Oregon State University when they were both students. Matthew was a senior, Ashley a junior, and she worked at the on-campus gym. He did his off-season training there in the winter of 2012-2013, and the two crossed paths at the gym frequently.
“He came in all the time, and I guess I caught his eye,” Ashley said. “He was very old-school and gentlemanly about it. He came and shook my hand and introduced himself and gave me his number and asked me to coffee.
“And I said, ‘Wow, that’s unexpected from a baseball player.’ So I gave him a shot.”
That was the start of their journey as a couple, one that has taken them through the Blue Jays, Tigers, Mariners, Guardians, and now Cubs organizations since Matthew debuted with Toronto in 2015. Kingdom Home was launched in early 2018, but Ashley’s interest in helping children around the world, and specifically in Uganda, started before she and Matthew met.
Ashley first took a trip to Uganda when she was 16 years old, on a month-long exchange program through her high school. She fell in love with the country on that trip, and when Ashley returned home, a guest speaker from International Justice Mission came to her church to share about their work with modern-day slavery and sex trafficking around the world.
That, Ashley said, is what opened her eyes to the problem and set her on the path that eventually became Kingdom Home.
“Ever since that, I knew that was the avenue I wanted to go down,” Ashley said.
She went to Oregon State as a pre-law major with plans of working for a non-governmental organization (NGO) that focused on combating slavery and child sex trafficking. Matthew and Ashley got married right out of college, and he got set to work on his professional baseball career after being drafted by the Blue Jays in 2013, and Ashley started a job at an international nonprofit as she had long hoped for.
From the early days of their relationship, Ashley said, they would talk about their hopes for their lives and for what they wanted their futures to look like. That included Matthew’s baseball career, but along with that, an increasingly shared vision for helping children in other parts of the world.
“His dreams became mine, and my dreams became his,” Ashley said. “We’ve really seen it, from day one, as not his thing and not my thing, but really our thing that we’re doing both of them together. It’s been really cool to see how they have woven together.”
During the first few years of Matthew’s professional baseball career, Ashley worked happily for a nonprofit in what she called her dream job while he climbed through the minor leagues.
But in late 2017, when they had their first child, Ashley stopped working for the nonprofit she’d been a part of and had a feeling that it was time to do something new. She said she felt an unease in her spirit, like there was something more she was supposed to be doing, and there was a pull back to Uganda specifically.
Through her old boss, Ashley got connected with a woman in Uganda who needed help. She and her husband had been running a home for children rescued from trafficking, but her husband had recently died, and she’d lost her funding.
There were 36 kids who had been rescued from brothels in the home at the time, all at risk of being returned to the places that had put them in their situation in the first place.
At the time, Matthew was still going back and forth between the Tigers and their Triple-A affiliate in Toledo, so there was a lot of uncertainty in their lives, but it felt to them too much like the right opportunity – one that doesn’t come along by accident – so they stepped in.
With the help of the board of directors, Ashley and Matthew got the necessary paperwork in order to make it all official, and in early 2018, the home on the brink of going under and sending nearly 40 vulnerable children out into risky situations became Kingdom Home with Matthew and Ashley at the reins.
“In that time, Ashley and I were asking about where we could serve, what’s the next step?” Matthew said. “What’s God calling us to? And He put the continent of Africa on our hearts.”
A few days later, they got the call about the home in Uganda. The timing was a challenge, going into the 2018 season and with a young child at home.
“At the time, I was still trying to cut my teeth in the big leagues. It’s spring training, and I’m trying to make the team, and one child that’s six months old,” Matthew said. “But basically it was like, there’s never going to be a perfect time. God put this country on our heart, this is literally right in front of us, where we can make a difference.”
By present day, Kingdom Home has expanded to three homes on the property and almost three times as many kids as they were able to support when they stepped in seven years ago. For the first time, Matthew said, they are at a point where they have hit sort of a capacity limit and have to think about what might need to come next for the organization.
Combating child sex trafficking is a complicated thing; kids get entangled for a variety of reasons, and in many cases, it’s in countries with levels of poverty unimaginable to most Americans.
Parents in these countries are sometimes left in desperation with a terrible choice to make, and not always one made knowingly. Oftentimes, they believe they are sending their children to work in the city to send money back home to the family, without knowing the full scope of what that work entails.
In Uganda, early childhood marriage is a longstanding cultural practice that contributes to the problem. At Kingdom Home, they have a hired staff consisting of a number of local people who work with the children who have been rescued from these situations in a variety of ways.
That staff includes leadership positions, male and female counselors, pastoral care, and house parents. Through their work, the kids in their care are equipped to be independent as they reach 18 years old.
This has an eventual ripple effect, and the hope is that over time, more and more Ugandans will be in situations where they can support themselves and their families, and that local traffickers will be driven out.
Traffickers generally don’t bother them, Ashley said, because they mostly take a preventative approach, taking in children before they are scooped up by traffickers preying on desperate parents. Those families are often grateful to be able to give their children a much better option in Kingdom Home, Ashley said.
The Boyds’ work with Kingdom Home is centered on their Christian faith, and in the Cubs’ locker room, Matthew’s personality has quickly won over his teammates. Dansby Swanson said Matthew’s demeanor and approach to life is infectious, and that’s to go along with Matthew’s incredible performance on the mound this season:
In 22 starts, Boyd has a 2.34 ERA and 118 strikeouts to just 29 walks. He’s thrown 14 quality starts so far, most recently against the Orioles at Wrigley Field on August 2, when Boyd tossed seven scoreless innings.
That kind of pitching has left a mark on the team, but like Swanson, catcher Carson Kelly is most struck by Matthew’s character. Kelly first met Matthew when he was visiting Oregon State as a prospective student. He was assigned to Matthew, who took great pride in getting guys to commit to the school.
The two of them have joked in the years since that Kelly not choosing Oregon State was a sore spot for Matthew, and when Kelly signed with the Cubs last offseason, one of the first texts he received was from Boyd.
“He’s very thoughtful and he’s very intentional when he’s talking to people,” Kelly told CHGO. “[He] really just takes the time to get to know people and give everybody the time of day and be interested in them as a person.”
Matthew has been through a lot in his professional career; after a breakout season with Detroit in 2019, injuries threatened to end his pitching days early, so much so that he was auditioning for teams just over a year ago. That led to signing with Cleveland in 2024 and then coming to the Cubs during this past offseason.
Baseball can be an unforgiving business, and getting back to the kind of success Matthew is having this year has yielded a lot of gratitude from him.
“We’re all byproducts of the journey that we’ve been through,” Kelly said. “The good, the bad, the stuff that’s out of your control. When you get to those points of failure, you learn a lot about yourself and what it takes to be present every day and go out there and compete.
“I think we’re seeing the best version of Matt Boyd, and he’s continuing to get better because he’s gone through those things. You are seeing him reap the rewards of all the hard work that he’s doing.”
Boyd’s performance on the mound is what everybody sees, and it’s worthy of attention. But it’s also temporary. A brilliant season ends. A great career comes to a close.
A legacy is different, however, and that’s what Matthew and Ashley are building, whether they seek public acknowledgment or credit for it or not. Their faith has imbued them both with a calling to do more than just ride the wave of a successful baseball career.
In Kingdom Home, they have the foundation for a legacy that will stand beyond Matthew’s pitching days. Ashley travels to Uganda frequently, and Matthew has joined her during the offseason on several occasions. In that place, there’s a shared pride in the impact they are seeing on the children at Kingdom Home.
“There’s so much joy at the houses,” Matthew said. Children there are able to act just like children, a product of the environment they are growing up in. “This is joyful, this is happy, this is how children should be living.
“That’s what we’re called to do. We’re called to the fatherless, we’re called to love. When you can go and love on somebody else, it’s amazing what it can do.”
