A Business Solution to Fighting Slavery
Location
TEN fights slavery with empowerment, 'slavery-proofing' survivors and high risk communities by giving them economic alternatives and education and using the Made By Survivors products to help build the abolition movement in the US.
About You
Location
Project Street Address
Project City
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Project Postal/Zip Code
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Your idea
Sector Focus
Business
Year the initative began (yyyy)
2005
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Web site (url)
Positioning of your initiative on the mosaic diagram
Which of these barriers is the primary focus of your work?
Vulnerability of targeted populations
Which of the principles is the primary focus of your work?
Increase community resilience
If you believe some other barrier or principle should be included in the mosaic, please describe it and how it would affect the positioning of your initiative in the mosaic
This field has not been completed. (333 words or less)
Name Your Project
A Business Solution to Fighting Slavery
Describe Your Idea
TEN fights slavery with empowerment, 'slavery-proofing' survivors and high risk communities by giving them economic alternatives and education and using the Made By Survivors products to help build the abolition movement in the US.
Innovation
What is your signature innovation, your new idea, in one sentence?
TEN fights slavery with empowerment, 'slavery-proofing' survivors and high risk communities by giving them economic alternatives and education and using the Made By Survivors products to help build the abolition movement in the US.
Describe your innovation. What makes your idea unique and different than others doing work in the field?
Our innovation is creating the link between raising awareness about slavery and improving the lives of survivors. This solves a core problem for the shelters (limited space and reintegration), creates a new future for the survivors, and offer consumers an easy opportunity to make an impact. For those who want to do more, we provide a path to becoming a modern abolitionist. Shelters that try making products typically find they are very hard to market. We are experts at marketing the products and we link our marketing to growing consumer awareness about slavery.
Delivery Model: How do you implement your innovation and apply it to the challenge/problem you are addressing?
We help the shelters start or grow their income generation programs and provide free business and product development to our partners. We are also our parners customer and we buy and market their handicrafts. We sell throughout the US in home awareness parties online and in stores and use our marketing to educate US consumers about slavery and how they can become abolitionists. We are building a branded line of Made By Survivors products. By having a recognized brand and strong marketing we help small shelters market thier products to a much larger audience than they could using their own resources. You can see an example of our marketing and how we link our story to education in this article in Family Circle read a recent article about us from Family Circle here www.madebysurvivors.com/images/familycircle.pdf
How do you plan to grow your innovation?
There are more NGOs that want our service than we can manage, so by growing our marketing program, and increasing the numbers of volunteers and reps we have, we sell more and generate the funds we need to expand our business development services. We educated at least 5000 Americans about slavery at Awareness events in 2007, and over 500 survivors were involved in making products for us, part-time or full-time. Our program is growing virally, and we expect to impact twice that many in 2008.
Do you have any existing partnerships, and if so, how do you create them?
We currently partner with anti-slavery NGOs in India, Nepal, Cambodia, the US, the Philippines, the Ukraine, Uganda and Thailand. We create partnerships by offering business development help and markets, then build them with regular contact and volunteer trips, and by following through on our commitments to offer income generation help. We also parter with US abolition groups like Free The Slaves and Polaris. At this point, we get most of our overseas parters when they seek out our help, but we also get referrals from our US partners and the US State Department TIP office.
Impact
Provide one sentence describing your impact/intended impact.
We empower survivors and high risk women/youth to rebuild their lives free from slavery and exploitation, and empower Americans to take concrete action to fight slavery and assist survivors.
What are the main barriers to creating or achieving your impact?
Reintegrating survivors into mainstream society is extremely challenging because of social stigma, and because some struggle with lack of education or with the physical and emotional effects of severe trauma.
In the US, while more and more people are now learning about human trafficking, we still need to get more people to take action and to really commit themselves to the anti-slavery movement. Taking people from 'oh, that's so sad' to 'That is unacceptable and i am going to do something about it!' is a continuing challenge.
Our main business barrier is capital. There are not a of funding options for growing social enterprise. The rate of our growth would accelerate significantly if we had more capital.
How many people have you served or plan to serve?
There is no natural limit on the number of survivors we can serve or the number of consumers we can motivate to become Abolitionists, at least until slavery and trafficking have ended.
Directly
We have reached approximately 10,000 Americans with slavery education at home parties and community events, and are currently employing about 300 survivors/high risk people part time or full time at shelters and prevention programs.
Indirectly
We could site things like website clicks to try to show large numbers, but for us the direct reach is our sole focus. We are happy when we recruit people to help our partners but we don't keep count of those connections.
Please list any other measures of the impact of your innovation?
On my last trip to Calcutta one of the survivors in our Destiny program told me her mother, who had also been trafficked, wanted her to go back the the brother and become a trafficker. Against her mothers wish, she is going to keep her job with us (she is a great designer). We cant easily measure these kinds of results. We cant yet, but hope to, measure things like how many people go to our home parities and then get involved in the abolition movement outside our programs (for example, getting involved with one of our policy or direct service partners)
Is there a policy intervention element to your innovation?
No, at least not directly, but as we recruit abolitionists we partner policy groups.
Exactly who are the beneficiaries of your innovation?
Survivors of human trafficking and slavery. The majority are women aged 16-25 who were trafficked into brothels as children but we are expanding into labor slavery survivors (like quarries) and in doing so reach more men. We also serve women and youth who are extremely vulnerable to trafficking through our work with prevention programs like DEPDC.
This Entry is about (Issues)
Sustainability
How is your initiative financed (or how do you expect your initiative will be financed)?
So far a combination of personal investment from savings, debt, and internal cash flows through sale of handicrafts. TEN Charities has received mostly individual donations but has had some foundation support. We are seeking all forms of social capital for working capital and growth capital.
If known, provide information on your finances and organization
We currently have four employees and hundreds of active volunteers. While we are happy to disclose financial data to individuals, investors, or donors, we prefer to respond to requests as opposed to open publishing, at least for TEN Inc.. As part of the hybrid model, TEN Charities fully complies with IRS and State disclosure rules but the business aspects of our program as described here are completely separate from TEN Charities. Unless our capital structure changes, all profits from the business are to be donated to TEN Charities. We are not profitable yet.
What is the potential demand for your innovation?
All survivors want independence. While not all survivors will fit into our model there are still many millions we hope to reach. The Made By Survivor's product categories and sales channels are all measured in billions so even small market share goals provide huge opportunity for the survivors.
What are the main barriers to financial sustainability?
Access to working capital. We can limit our growth to manage cash flows but would prefer to take the risk of growth and if we don't have access to working and expansion capital we could grow faster than we can support on internal cash flows.
The Story
What is the origin of this innovation? Tell us your story.
In 2003, Sarah saw a documentary film which told the stories of girls enslaved in Indian brothels. After being rescued, they participated in an Underground Railroad with local activists - rescuing others, working the borders, and raising awareness in remote villages.
Their courage compelled us to find a way to help, and we resolved to dedicate our lives to the issue.
Sarah began volunteering with one the largest rescue and rehabilitation programs, Maiti Nepal. In 2004 she visited Maiti and asked the founder what was needed most. She said their biggest problem was reintegrating survivors and finding them jobs. Maiti had a crafts program for art therapy but was unable to sell the products.
After exploring this problem and researching and contacting other shelters, we resolved to address the problem of trafficking with an economic empowerment model. Many friends and people from our community soon joined our efforts, thus we have been able to grow quickly and add other NGO partners.
Please provide a personal bio. Note this may be used in Changemakers marketing material
Prior to starting TEN, Sarah Symons worked both in the nonprofit and business worlds, serving as Program Director and Artist in Residence for Creative Arts Workshops, a program serving homeless kids in New York City. She has
John Berger brings 18 years of Wall Street business experience to the organization, having worked as an investment banker at Prudential Securities, Smith Barney and BB&T. John is a Chartered Financial Analyst and has extensive experience evaluating, improving, and financing business models in a variety of industries.
Emphasis of Work
Prevention, Rehabilitation, Empowerment, Education, Movement Building
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Comments
Dear John;
It is obvious that TEN does great work and is making great strides in impacting the lives of survivors. In your entry you mentioned that as TEN expands you hope to be able to reach more men. It would be interesting to hear more about this. Why are men currently a vulnerable population in terms of trafficking? Are they more vulnerable to trafficking, are they underserved, are they hard to reach, any if so why? How would your current programming objectives and strategies have to change to successfully reach men and incorporate them as beneficiaries?
Also, it would be interesting to know what types of products survivors are making, how they are marketed to the public and even a bit about the process of deciding what products survivors produce. It is market-driven, skill-based, or resource-driven?
Keep up the good work!
Laura Cardinal
Public Health and Trafficking Specialist
Laura,
Thanks for your questions. I’ll try to keep my answers reasonably short but it’s a complex and important topic so please ask any follow-up questions my answer might raise. You probably already know a lot about this but since there might be folks reading who don’t Ill try to keep it fundamental.
There are a variety of different types of slavery that people are trafficked into, so while women are trafficked primarily for sexual exploitation or domestic service, men are often trafficked for labor. The reasons men are venerable are the same reasons women are vulnerable: poverty, lack of opportunity, culture, and poor or corrupt law enforcement. Are they underserved? Well, slavery and trafficking in general is one of the most underserved human rights problems in the world, so yes they are, and there do seem to be more NGOs currently working on trafficking for sex than for labor.
There is one other element that to be honest I had not thought much about until this past year. This really gets to the prevention of trafficking. In communities that have a lot of trafficking for sex, like brothel communities and border/transit communities, its obvious the girls grow up vulnerable to be exploited. But we can’t ignore the fact the boys are growing up venerable to be the exploiters. The boys in these communities are future pimps and traffickers.
An NGO that works to prevent trafficking in these communities made a pretty good case to us that it is just as important to educate the boys and give them opportunities for a life that gets them out of the trade as it is for the girls, and having seen their programs work, this makes a lot of sense to me.
You asked how our programming objectives would need to change to work with men. This is not so much a forward thinking policy shift for us as it has been an evolution. We started strictly working with women survivors of sex-trafficking. We then met some great prevention programs working with young women and their families and started working with them (groups like DEPDC). Then Free The Slaves asked us to work with a group of women that had been rescued from intergenerational slavery in rock quarries. They were making beads but needed help expanding the program. (product example - http://store.madebysurvivors.com/product-p/san10glass.htm ) In that case whole families were rescued so we asked what the men were doing. We also have a current need for a group that can do lost wax casting for jewelry and it turns out the men in the community have casting skills. Now we have not set that up yet as we don’t have the resources available, but just because those families have been rescued from one form of slavery does not make them immune in the future. Their poverty, lack of opportunity, and low social status make their daughters and sons prime targets for sex and labor traffickers. So helping the whole family unit is an important part of the prevention strategy and I would be happy to able to work with the men in that community – especially as it would be very practical for us to combine the bead making, and jewelry casting possibility into a really nice and productive community enterprise.
So in a case like that, it’s an evolution. There is a group on the border of India and Nepal that has been asking us to set up a program and this is in a community where the only business is trafficking and prostitution. If we are able to help them I can see opportunities there to help the boys as well, for the same prevention reason I wrote about above.
So we are not talking about making dramatic changes to our program objectives or strategies. We believe in being very focused and have no choice but to be as efficient as possible with our resources. The only area I see that we should make an effort to expand the program about men is with the training videos we use for ambassadors and home parties. We now have a lot of people who have done multiple parties and we need to get them fresh material and use that opportunity to educate them further about other aspects of slavery. So we plan soon to do some videos on labor trafficking and more about men in sex-trafficking.
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John Berger
The
Hi John,
it is for a good cause, it will change many, i hope you win, best wishes. Rachel www.peacecaravan.wordpress.com
Laura,
Im answering the business part of your question separately as the other part was getting long.
We currently focus on jewelry, handbags, homegoods, paper products, and clothing. (see http://store.madebysurvivors.com/ ) This is all meant to be demand driven in that we want to help our partners produce products for western consumers. We start with what our partners already know how to do (like sewing) and we look carefully at other products in their local markets, and what materials and trainers are available locally. But we don’t just buy what they can make just because they can make it, we shape the products to work for a western consumer.
Also, most of our partners don’t know how to figure out things like product or order level profitability, so we help them focus on products that are the best products for them to make.
We market to the public in several ways. Our favorite way is the home party, which as you may know is a $10 billion a year industry in the US. We like that channel because it lets us educate our customers about slavery and recruit the party guests to get involved. This does not just mean recruiting them to host more parties, we recruit volunteers for our other partners as well. It’s a tool for growing the abolitionist community.
We also sell on the web and use traditional product placement marketing to drive that channel. For example, our placement team got us a full page article in Family Circle lately. Things like that drive web sales and party recruitment, and educate a reader base that mostly is unaware slavery still exists.
And we are expanding into wholesale as well. With e-commerce and wholesale we still try to keep an element of education, so we have educational tags on our products and are working on improving educational materials that will go to all our customers. Most of our wholesale customers are fair trade or socially conscious gift shops and they really get behind us and help us educate their customers so we need to create more display based educational material we can give to them.
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John Berger
The
sorry - double post
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John Berger
The Emancipation Network
http://www.madebysurvivors.com/
Hi John,
It would be great if you could include some more details about the impact of your work.
Thanks
Dana Frasz
Ashoka's Changemakers
Sorry it took me so long to get to this question about impact. We had one of our Nepali partners in the US this past week working with us on expanding their operations and I was buried in the details of that work.
Our impact is on three different populations. The first population is the survivors and at risk women that work in our programs. I’m going to add a quick story about one survivor below, but these women have been through so much that it is amazing they can function, let alone become successful and live happy, normal lives. But they want the same things all of us do, security, safety, and family, and the jobs they get through our program are an important part of living a normal , happy life.
The second way we make in impact is on the next generation and the community. This means the impact on the children of the survivors and the high risk groups (like the children in the red light districts we work with). Extreme vulnerability to trafficking and slavery is not caused by random bad luck: vulnerability is caused by poverty, lack of opportunity, culture, and other factors that we can change. Basically the community is not strong enough to protect its children. Our belief is that the empowerment, jobs, education, and community strength that is created by programs like ours and many others in this competition, will result in reducing trafficking and slavery.
The remaining systematic impact we hope to make is to help building awareness about slavery and recruiting a generation of modern abolitionists. Most people in the US are unaware slavery even exists, let alone how they can help survivors and end slavery. This is why we don’t just buy the products and market them generically as Fair Trade. We sell Made By Survivor products, and link our selling to education. When a consumer gets one of our products we want to use the product and the materials we send with it to open them up to the reality of slavery and the reality that they can do something to end it. We are especially interested in working with other Abolition groups that need volunteers and funding so we can help recruit our interested customers to help other Abolition groups.
I know this is long but I wanted to add one story to make the point that even the best success stories are at risk of failure if we don’t make systematic changes to ending slavery. This story is about a survivor who was trafficked into a circus in India at about 7 years old. Circus trafficking is part labor trafficking, as they are slaves that are made to perform dangerous acts, and part sex trafficking, as the circuses are also traveling brothels. This survivor was rescued in her teens and had several years of excellent therapy and rehabilitation. As a young adult she went to go work in one of our partners income generation programs, and now sews some of the bags we sell. It is amazing that she could go through what she has and end up where she is as, but this and most other stories are never that simple. She is unable to return back to her home because her parents and community think she is a slut. Trafficked at 7, against her will obviously, and this lost daughter is viewed as a slut. So she has an enormous barrier to feeling like part of a community or family.
One day she went to the manager and said that she was going to leave the sewing work because she we going to the middle east. She was going to pay a recruiter $2,000 that she had saved from work to be sent to the middle east to be a maid. For those of you who don’t know – this is very often a trafficking scam. This young woman, who had already survived trafficking, was about to put herself in a situation that very likely would have resulted in being trafficked again. Because she had a great relationship with the staff, she told them about her decision and they were able to work with her to make her understand the risk she was taking, and happily, she decided to stay.
I tell this story to help explain how complicated and fragile even the best success stories can be. But there is another part to this. Two months after deciding to stay she randomly met a young man she knew as a child from her village. They fell in love and were married, a “love marriage” as it is called in her country where most marriages are arranged. So this survivor now has the kind of future to be normal, have a family, a job, and a happy life that is the right of all people. I believe her children and her community will be at much lower risk of slavery as well.
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John Berger
The
Thank you John - It would be great if you could include some of this information on your impact back into your entry form.
Thanks!
Dana Frasz
Ashoka's Changemakers
Hello,
I am one of those people that don't know much about human trafficking and reading about your project I am thinking it makes a lot of sense to try and help them reintegrate in the society.
Is your work mostly or entirely in the communities where these people live? Do you actually send your volunteers there to help?
Thank you
Yes, and thank you for asking. We work where the survivors are, so thats means red light districts, border towns, etc. We do send volunteers to work with us and our partners. The opportunity does depend a lot on what you can do and how long you can stay. Some places and roles we would only send a volunteer if they can stay for six months. But we also have shorter, two week group volunteer trips that we run as well.
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John Berger
The Emancipation Network
http://www.madebysurvivors.com/