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Take Root, a non-profit organization established on a grant from the United States Department of Justice, is the first missing-child organization ever founded by former abducted children. Founded in 2003 and incorporated as a 501(c)(3) in 2005, over five hundred former abducted children have participated, providing peer support to fellow former abducted children, advocating on child-abduction issues from the child-victim's perspective, and providing landmark information on the victimology of child-abduction to multidisciplinary professionals, impacted families, and the public. The agency's mission is to "insert the voice of the primary victim into public and policy discussions on abduction, using the collected wisdom of former missing-children to improve America's missing-child response." Their tags-line are "beyond recovering missing-children; to helping missing-children recover" and, "where missing children are seen and heard." Take Root is the brain child of Melissa "Liss" Haviv, a Fulbright Scholar in cultural anthropology and former abduction victim who is considered a leading expert in the victimology of long term child abduction