One of the Great Human Rights Challenges of our Time: More than 40 million women, men and children are brutalized in forced labor or forced prostitution. Trapped through force, fraud or coercion, they are kept in place through violence and intimidation. They are unable to benefit from international development programs.

Historic Win-Win Opportunity: Modern slavery thrives in impoverished and marginalized communities where large international relief and development organizations already work on a wide range of initiatives. Free the Slaves seeks to partner with these organizations to eradicate modern slavery at scale while helping partners improve the reach of their other development programs.

Download the booklet detailing our strategy: Catalyzing a Civil Society Movement Against Slavery.

Strategy

• Mainstream anti-slavery work into field programs at international relief and development organizations.
• Integrate Free the Slaves community-based anti-slavery approaches into organizations that already work at a community level in slavery hot spots.
• Focus on slavery-proofing entire communities rather than rescuing individuals, creating sustained community resistance and resilience.

Benefits

• Eliminate slavery as a contributing cause of socioeconomic problems in vulnerable communities.
• Expand the reach of socioeconomic development programs by removing slavery as a barrier that blocks villagers from participating in aid projects.
• Enhance sustainability of development interventions by ensuring beneficiaries aren’t enslaved by human traffickers in the future.

Process

• Train field staff in anti-slavery strategies, utilizing the Free the Slaves Community Liberation Toolkit.
• Coach field staff implementing anti-slavery techniques by embedding Free the Slaves mentors as a technical assistance advisers.
• Measure impact by implementing Free the Slaves techniques to assess a community’s ability to avoid enslavement of residents in the future.

Community Liberation Model

• Four strategies, working together, create systemic and sustainable change.

See a full-size illustration of the model here and in our booklet Catalyzing a Civil Society Movement Against Slavery.

Partnerships & Coalitions Model

• Working with high-impact development organizations to build a stronger and more effective anti-slavery movement.
• Free the Slaves goal: 25,000 slavery-free & slavery-resistant communities by 2030.

See a full-size illustration of the model here and in our booklet Catalyzing a Civil Society Movement Against Slavery.

The Community Liberation Toolkit distills the knowledge, skills and norms needed to implement the Free the Slaves community-based approach to liberate people from slavery and change the conditions that allow slavery to persist.

Module 1

Educating and Mobilizing Vulnerable Communities: Develops understanding of rights under international and national laws, safe migration, and cultivating attitudes and norms that challenge social hierarchies and discrimination that hold people in servitude. Provides training on how to engage highly vulnerable communities in participatory learning and action so that new, protective behaviors emerge, including the fostering of anti-slavery committees that help protect the community from exploitation.

Module 2

Survivor Liberation, Care and Reintegration: Trains participants on indicators of slavery and action steps to take when slavery is suspected under different circumstances. Helps participants develop context-appropriate standards and norms of care for survivors. Educates participants on principles of trauma-informed care. Provides tools for monitoring survivor progress.

Module 3

Strengthening the Rule of Law: Develops understanding of human trafficking policies and exercises for analyzing national policy. Cultivates policy advocacy skills. Provides essential information for training police, judges and other local authorities on slavery detection and prosecution, as well as justice for survivors.

Module 4

Ensuring Access to Essential Social and Economic Services: Focuses on developing partnerships between anti-slavery organizations and relief and development organizations and agencies. Identifies opportunities and challenges to integrating anti-slavery interventions into development programs. Helps participants develop action plans for integrating anti-slavery interventions into the programs of relief and development organizations.

In a typical partnership, a two person Free the Slaves team will be embedded in-country into the partner organization. The embed team will be backstopped by a range of training, programmatic implementation and project evaluation experts at Free the Slaves regional hubs and global headquarters.

Adaptation

Contextualization of Tactics & Materials: Modern slavery takes many forms, and no two international relief or development organizations are alike. The integration process begins with baseline assessments of slavery’s dynamics in the target area and the partner organization’s existing community-oriented field operations. Training materials are then contextualized to ensure effective and efficient integration.

Training

A Flexible Modular Approach: The five modules of the Community Liberation Toolkit embody the core pillars of the Free the Slaves Community Liberation Model, which has been field tested in more than 2,000 communities in six countries in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Each weeklong training module includes a trainer’s manual, participant’s manual, exercises and full presentation materials. The modular approach allows the training program to be rolled out over a flexible period of time—with the partner organization determining the timing, order and emphasis for each module.

Coaching

Implementation Support: Embedded Free the Slaves team members will work with the partner organization’s staff to ensure principles of each training module are put to practice. Free the Slaves has co-implemented its Community Liberation Model for more than a decade with front-line in-country nonprofit organizations. This experience in program implementation will ensure that integration of anti-trafficking strategies is effective in target communities.

Evaluating

Gauging Impact: Free the Slaves is pioneer in developing groundbreaking tools to monitor and evaluate the success of community-based anti-trafficking interventions. These tools measure the successful reintegration of individual survivors, to ensure they are supported in their transition to freedom and are able to live productive lives without risk of further enslavement. These tools also measure community capacity to sustainably ward off traffickers and collectively overcome the economic, social and political conditions that make their residents vulnerable to modern slavery. Ongoing M&E work during project rollout and implementation ensures a learning culture, enabling course corrections if needed.

Download the booklet detailing our strategy: Catalyzing a Civil Society Movement Against Slavery.