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
In line with our mission, we strive to empower survivor leaders to reintegrate into society as healed, thriving individuals whose mental health and safety are prioritized. We employ a trauma-informed approach that fosters healthy relationships and a strong sense of community, recognizing their crucial role in healing.
Our programs emphasize holistic well-being, ensuring both physical and emotional safety. We create spaces where survivors feel secure and supported, offering a range of therapeutic options that respect their autonomy and individual healing journeys.
By encouraging peer connections, we build a community where survivors can lean on each other, share experiences, and grow together, ultimately helping them reclaim their place in society as empowered individuals.
Economic Justice and Self-Determination
This program focuses on empowering women with lived experience of human trafficking by building their capacity to achieve success and self-sufficiency. We understand that each survivor follows a unique journey, influenced by their individual strengths and aspirations. Therefore, we continually tailor our approaches to support survivors' leaders in furthering their education, securing gainful employment, and fostering entrepreneurial ventures.
Survivor Leadership and Advocacy
The survivor leadership program at Azadi fosters a community of leaders driving societal change. It handles membership, welfare, and advocacy activities. From the start, our vision has been to empower survivors to advocate for their rights, conduct research, and represent their communities. Today, survivors have formed three active sub-communities: art, research, and outreach.
The art community uses creative mediums for advocacy, the outreach community engages with stakeholders through various activities, and the research community provides data-driven evidence for advocacy. We offer leadership training and welfare support to ensure effective participation. Our approach emphasizes communal care, benefiting individuals through community-focused activities.
Knowledge Production and Sharing
With this programme, we recognize and hone survivor leaders’ inherent expertise which they have gathered from their lived experience going through the human trafficking process. We support people with lived experience in trafficking in recognising the value of this expertise and using it for the greater good, including tools and capacities to share and ways to unlearn bad practices, prejudice, and stigma. This expertise is used to educate the greater society, inform interventions, encourage change, and move the anti-trafficking sector to be lived experience-centered
