Our Approach
Our approach centres around four basic principles from which all our other work and programmes spring.
Read about each of these four programmes and the activities that fall under each of them below.
Safeguarding and Wellbeing
We are taking steps to develop the capacity of survivor leaders to engage in the greater society meaningfully as fully formed, healed, thriving members of society, whose mental health is taken seriously, whose experience and their trauma doesn’t define them, and whose safety isn’t compromised. We recognise the importance of healthy relationships and community as a core part of healing and intentionally work with survivors to teach, provide tools, and create a space where they can develop them. We want to create a space where they are given tools by mental health professionals to reach a state of well-being, but also one where they are encouraged to lean on each other and engage with other peers’ journey to safety and well-being.
Economic Justice and Self-Determination
This programme focuses on building the capacity of lived experience so that they can be both successful and self-sufficient. We believe that each person has a unique path determined by their strengths. Therefore, for some this process may include furthering their education, getting gainful employment, or becoming entrepreneurs. As they enter the workforce, they become self-sufficient, gain capital and reduce the power structures that exist that make them and their communities vulnerable.
Survivor Leadership and Advocacy
This programme aims to build a community of survivor leaders who will impact change in the society and create a culture that includes and is driven by survivor leaders. This includes people with lived experience engaging meaningfully in the fight for their rights, speaking up, doing outreach, and advocating on behalf of themselves and their community. We will have them lead the movement, inspire others, and advocate change, which will foster more leadership. They will also have front-row tickets to claiming their rights and those of their community in both the anti-trafficking and the wider human rights sector.
Knowledge Production and Sharing
With this programme, we are all about recognising and honing survivor leaders’ inherent expertise which they have gathered from their lived experience going through the human trafficking process. We want to support people with lived experience in trafficking in recognising the value of this expertise and learning how to use it for the greater good, including tools and capacities to share and ways to unlearn bad practices, prejudice, and stigma. This can be used to educate the greater society to inform interventions, encourage change, and move the anti-trafficking sector to be lived experience-centred
