Increasing Lived Experience Leadership throughout the anti-slavery movement is core to everything GFEMS does. We understand that there is enormous potential for change when all efforts–from grassroots implementation to international lawmaking–are guided by those with lived experience.
“Lived Experience” is the personal, subjective, and firsthand encounters, events, and situations that individuals go through in their lives. It encompasses a person’s experiences, including thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and memories. Lived experiences can be unique to each person and are central to shaping an individual’s beliefs, perspectives, and understanding of the world. “Leadership” here means those people who have lived experience hold decision-making power. Generally we’re talking about people with lived experience of modern slavery, but we extend the concept to communities and other aspects of identity. Essentially, if a program is based on you and your needs, you ought to have say in it.
This is a hot topic of discussion in the anti-slavery movement, as it is in other movements. A lot of our peer organizations use the word “Survivor” to talk about the same concepts, and while GFEMS supports these efforts, we choose to use “Lived Experience” to stress that this is about more than an identity–it’s a valid perspective and form of expertise that should be held equally with other forms.
We recognize that Lived Experience is a form of expertise and a perspective equal to other kinds of expertise and perspectives. Like other kinds of expertise and perspective, such as scientific, statistical, or economic expertise, lived experience has its own unique uses. How do we know whether a program meets the actual needs of people with lived experience, or whether a new law would actually have made a positive impact for them? We listen to them.
Its also about Dignity. We see the ability to make one’s own decisions, to tell one’s own story, and to be seen in one’s full identity as essential elements to a dignified life. Following lived experience leadership ensures that the people most affected by modern slavery are the ones shaping the response.
GFEMS is both a funder of lived experience leadership and a technical partner for organizations looking to increase their level of lived experience leadership. We directly support lived experience-led organizations, and we coach our other partners to get them there. We also develop tools and resources for organizations looking to make a change, and we will partner with you to guide you through it in your own programming.
Wade Arvizu leads our efforts on lived experience engagement. He is a published author, public speaker and human trafficking subject matter expert. He has been providing recommendations and input to inform research, policies, and programs to combat trafficking since 2014.
Wade ArvizuDear friends,
As we approach the end of 2023, I’d like to reflect on the incredible journey our organization has taken since it was founded and our shift in the past two years to address the issue of modern slavery. There is no doubt that these past three years have been particularly challenging, marked by a convergence of global crises that have tested us and our ability to change and adapt. Personally, the past few months have felt quite heavy as an activist and a citizen of the world. I have consistently asked myself what it means to be in solidarity with all the people fighting for their life and their rights to exist at this time. Many times, words have failed me, and that incoherence led me to write a poem that I want to share here on being present as a form of resistance:
Present
The call to be present
Present and be a witness
Present and sit between comfort and chaos
Comfort for us to dream
Chaos for us to be reminded why we dream
The call to be present
Present and be a witness
Present to look unprecedented evil in the eye
Present to sit between hope and helplessness
Hope for fuel to create the future
Helplessness reminds us of humility and the purpose of community
The call to be present
The call to trust that being is resistance
The call to know that survival can be resistance
The call to remember that we are not the first to survive
The call to remember the seed never dies
It’s a reminder that the seed of resistance never dies, even on days like this when we feel hopeless, and that our efforts fall short of the insurmountable issues that we have to address in the world.
As many of you are now aware, the multifaceted challenges of the past few years compelled us to reevaluate and reshape our organizational strategy to ensure that we are effective in this ever-evolving landscape. We launched our new strategy in January that highlighted our shift to focus on movement building and advocacy led by impacted communities.
One of the first things we did to align with our new strategy was to review our own approach and internal operations with the help of the National Survivor Network. This process led to the development of a first-of-its-kind toolkit on meaningful engagement of people with lived experience. The toolkit is free and has information, including tools to evaluate processes within your organization. The toolkit is being used by the US Office of Drugs and Crime for their partners, and we are in the process of adapting some of it for the Council of Europe on a protocol for meaningful inclusion of survivors of child sexual exploitation. We firmly believe that for a movement to truly be led by impacted people, their engagement in the process has to be meaningful and intentional. Our toolkit provides a path towards that intentionality.
Our advocacy work in Brazil focused on increasing worker voices in the coffee supply chain and led to the development and beginning of the implementation of a worker-centric grievance and mechanism supported by civil society, trade unions, government, and the UN. Under this strategy, we also partnered to develop a methodology to prevent forced labor and promote decent work in high-risk municipalities where vulnerable people are recruited to work under forced labor. In all this, we are proud to support our partners, Instituto Trabalho Decente, Clínica de Trabalho Escravo e Tráfico de Pessoas da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Confederação Nacional dos Trabalhadores Assalariados e Assalariadas Rurais and LRQA, to ensure that workers are central in our work to address forced labor in supply chains.
One of the key accomplishments of this year has been moving our headquarters from Washington DC, to Nairobi. The goal was to move the decision-making processes of the organization to communities that are closer to this issue. We officially have a Nairobi office and are hiring staff as we roll out the new strategy. I was also selected as a commissioner in the Global Commission on Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking, which was formed by Theresa May. I will be co-chairing the commission, and I am looking forward to the work that the commission can do at a global level to galvanize political support and collaboration to address this issue.
As we close the 2023 chapter, we carry the lessons learned and successes achieved into the new year. We look forward to doing a lot of movement-building work in the coming year. With your support, we are confident that 2024 will be a year of transformative action, marked by tangible progress and renewed hope.
Thank you for standing with us in addressing the issue of modern slavery.
Wishing you all happy holidays!
With warm regards,
Sophie.
GFEMS believes that progress will best be achieved when those how have been most affected are positioned to lead. As such, we developed this toolkit to guide its own practices for the meaningful inclusion of people with lived experience in our research. The hope is that others in the field will find the concepts herein useful, and join us in this journey.
This guidance document is for funders and organizations that aim to improve their inclusion of people with lived experiences of modern slavery in their research, and monitoring, evaluation, accountability, and learning work. This includes those who currently or strive to provide funding directly to researchers, empower people with lived experience in the research process, or better support person with lived experience engagement in the movement.
The tool is not intended to be a one-size-fits-all checklist, but rather a way to help define and conduct research with the intention of ensuring people with lived experience are included in producing research and thus moving up the ladder of person with lived experience inclusion in research.
PLEASE NOTE: GFEMS is in the process of expanding and revising this toolkit in collaboration with our peer organizations. We will update this page periodically.
Meaningful Engagement of People with Lived Experience: a framework and assessment for measuring and increasing lived experience leadership across the spectrum of engagement is a first-of-its-kind resource that offers guidance and tools to support organizations’ progress toward meaningful survivor engagement.
Any efforts to end human trafficking or modern slavery will be bound by the degree to which they embrace meaningful lived experience leadership. The best efforts to address human trafficking will view impacted individuals and communities as full collaborators and will maintain the trust of their participants, which means they must be centered on the needs of people with lived experience at all levels of the organization, policy, or program.
This toolkit was developed by people with lived experience and allies, in a collaboration between The Global Fund to End Modern Slavery and The National Survivor Network. We built it for use within our own organizations, and we hope it will be useful more broadly across the anti-trafficking and related fields.
Inside the toolkit you will:
Practitioners are recognizing that lived experience expertise is vital in increasing the efforts of addressing the issue of modern slavery. This is as true on the level of research and evidence as it is on the level of intervention. Taking a participatory approach to research, incorporating the views and priorities of people with lived experience even at the earliest stages, ensures that the resulting findings, best practices, program recommendations, and other pieces of the “evidence base” actually fit the reality of modern slavery. Unfortunately, the field has, to date, lacked a real pathway to increasing the level of participation of people with lived experience in research and evidence.
GFEMS and Survivor Alliance have launched a two-pronged effort to increase participation of people with lived experience in global Modern Slavery research. In one stream of activity, we will hold lived experience working groups and a support Survivor Alliance’s World Congress to advance collaborative survivor-led review and discussions of key issue areas; in the other, we will engage lived experience advisors and research institutions to further develop and operationalize standard operating procedures for survivor-informed research.
Though high-level multi-stakeholder convenings occur every year, few have been or are led primarily by survivors of modern slavery. When Survivor Alliance’s first World Congress took place in July 2021, it was the first global sector gathering at which survivors represented the majority of both participants and speakers, and set the agenda. Through this project, GFEMS support Survivor Alliance’s 2024 World Congress, and we’ll work together and with the event’s attendees to build up the global evidence base on trafficking from the perspective of survivor leaders.
Alongside the events at the World Congress, GFEMS is leveraging its Funders Toolkit for Lived Experience Inclusion in Modern Slavery Research to enhance modern slavery research as a discipline. We are establishing a consultant corps of people with lived experience who have the capacity to work on different aspects of research projects. Alongside the consultant corps, we will engage organizations producing modern slavery related research to bolster their knowledge and efforts in working meaningfully with people with lived experience. Then, as partnerships are developed with research institutions, we will connect consultant corps members with institutions who can use their efforts. A secondary goal is to share the consultant database widely so that practitioners can also engage consultants in the future.
This guidance document is for funders and organizations that aim to improve their inclusion of people with lived experiences of modern slavery in their research, and monitoring, evaluation, accountability, and learning work. This includes those who currently or strive to provide funding directly to researchers, empower people with lived experience in the research process, or better support person with lived experience engagement in the movement. We’re improving this resource through the POWER project–check back for updates
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Working with local partners, leaders with lived experience, and others invested in human dignity, GFEMS is building the momentum needed for sustainable change.
Dear friends,
Happy new year from the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery! Thank you to each and every person that has been part of the GFEMS journey–our staff, donors, and partners. You have all been, and will continue to be, crucial in shaping our path.
In 2022, our team took time to evaluate, learn, and shift direction based on feedback we received after implementing our inaugural projects in Asia and Africa. We are excited to share what we have learned and build on those lessons to move in a new strategic direction.
Our new approach focuses on
1) building a survivor-centric environment,
2) funding and building the foundation for a movement, and
3) supporting advocacy.
I speak about the Fund’s updated approach in more detail here.
The first tenet of our updated direction involves creating a survivor centered environment. We have already begun this work by partnering with the National Survivor Network and completing an internal review of GFEMS addressing the issue of survivor inclusion. Our team engaged in honest conversations about where we are, where we want to be, and the changes needed to center survivors in our own internal operations. Our partnership with NSN has resulted in co-creation of a toolkit, which we believe can help other organizations seeking practical tools to become more inclusive of survivors.
GFEMS has also made the decision to ultimately shift its core operations from Washington DC to Nairobi, a long-term goal which we will begin working towards this month. This reflects an effort to be more present in and shift power to regions most affected by modern slavery.
We will continue to update you on the progress and the changes related to our work. As Human Trafficking Awareness Month, January is a time for all of us to amplify this issue and show solidarity with the people most affected. This month, spare some time to learn about a new organization or activist in our space working tirelessly to address human trafficking. We cannot address this issue alone, we have always been stronger together.
All the best,
Sophie
The Fund is working with Survivor Alliance on POWER: Promoting Opportunities Within Evidence and Research. POWER is a two-pronged effort to improve engagement of people with lived experience in the human trafficking sector. In one stream of activity, we will hold lived experience working groups and Survivor Alliance’s World Congress to advance collaborative survivor-led review and discussions of key issue areas; in the other, we will engage lived experience advisors and research institutions to further develop and operationalize standard operating procedures for survivor-informed research. The project adapts new approaches to the human trafficking sector and will produce a rich evidence base on survivor engagement efforts and responds to an increased call for more survivor inclusion in the sector.
Survivor Alliance’s mission is to unite and empower survivors of slavery and human trafficking around the world to be leaders in the anti-slavery movement. Founded by three survivors of human trafficking, we are of, by, and for survivors. We believe that investing in survivors is a key anti-trafficking intervention. For too long, survivors have been ignored and tokenized in anti-trafficking work. Although there is greater inclusion in some countries, such as the United States, it is not yet an integrated best practice in the US or throughout the world. Additionally, there remains a gap in ethical, meaningful, and structural engagement with survivors and limited actors developing guidance for survivor engagement. Survivor engagement in anti-trafficking work also remains siloed from other social justice movements, such as workers’ rights and gender-based violence movements.