Azadi at 5: Five Years of Community, Survivor Leadership and Collective Care
Updated: Oct 9
Five years ago, Azadi began with a simple but powerful question: what does reintegration look like when survivors are given the space, time and freedom to define it for themselves?
It began with a handful of survivors sitting together, imagining a different kind of community. A community where survivors could find safety, belonging and connection beyond the traditional limits of rescue, shelter and rehabilitation. A community where survivors were not simply recipients of support but leaders, decision-makers, dreamers and builders of their own futures.
Five years later, that community is Azadi.
On 30 July, as the world marked the World Day Against Trafficking in Persons, Azadi Community gathered with its members, partners, friends and allies to celebrate five years of building, learning, questioning, dreaming and growing together.
It was more than an anniversary. It was a moment to pause and recognise what can happen when survivors are trusted to shape the spaces and systems that affect their lives.
And, true to the spirit of Azadi, the celebration was not only about looking back. It was also about looking forward.
Five years of imagining what could be
In her opening remarks, Azadi Co-Managing Director Faith reflected on an unexpected lesson from a learning session she had recently attended: futures thinking is a discipline.
As she listened to ideas around long-term thinking, participation, agency, possibility and innovation, something became clear.
“Azadi has been living in the future.”
For five years, Azadi has been experimenting with what the future of survivor leadership, workplaces, communities and society could look like. It has questioned systems that often place individualism at the centre and instead chosen to build around collectiveness.
The celebration was therefore an opportunity to celebrate not just where Azadi has come from but the privilege of building a future together.
A future where survivors lead.
A future where community is part of healing.
A future where care is taken seriously.
A future where people can dream beyond what they have been told is possible.
Launching Azadi's first Strategic Plan: 2026–2030
One of the day's significant milestones was the launch of Azadi's first Strategic Plan, 2026–2030.
For five years, Azadi has grown organically, guided by continuous questioning, learning, relationships and the needs of its members. The new Strategic Plan does not seek to change the heart of Azadi. Instead, it gives greater shape and direction to where the community is going.
It is a plan rooted in Freedom, Leadership and Lasting Change.
Faith described it as, in many ways, a love letter to Azadi's own sustainability, a promise that the community being built today will continue to exist, evolve and serve its members in the years ahead.
The plan represents an important transition for Azadi: from reflecting on what has been built to intentionally shaping what comes next.
But perhaps most importantly, it is a future being imagined with the community, rather than for it.
The Story of Azadi: Passing knowledge forward
The celebration also marked the launch of The Story of Azadi: Lessons in Survivor Leadership and Collective Care.
The document captures some of the lessons Azadi has gathered along its journey: what worked, what did not, what was difficult, what surprised the community and what it continues to learn.
It was not created as a blueprint for others to reproduce Azadi.
Instead, it is an offering.
Over the years, other survivor collectives have reached out to Azadi with questions about how the community structures itself, how leadership is shared, how members hold one another accountable and how collective care can work in practice.
The Story of Azadi is part of the community's response.
It is a way of saying: this is what we have learned so far and we are willing to share it.
In this sense, documenting the journey is also an act of solidarity. It is knowledge created in community and offered back to community.
Read more by downloading: The Story of Azadi
A founder's blessing and a new chapter of leadership
The celebration also held space for a deeply meaningful transition.
After five years of helping nurture the vision she co-founded, Sophie Otiende, Azadi's Founder, formally handed over the final threads of the work she began to Azadi's Co-Managing Directors, Faith Wanjiku and Mariam Awori.
It was not simply a change in leadership. It was a powerful demonstration of what survivor-led leadership can look like when it is rooted in trust.
In her farewell blessing, Sophie reflected on the many people who helped shape Azadi and challenged the idea of being “self-made.” Azadi, she reminded the community, has always been a communal product.
It was built through conversations, disagreements, WhatsApp messages, meetings, lunches, relationships, care and countless small acts of showing up.
And while Sophie was transitioning from the role she had held, she made clear that she was not leaving the community.
She was handing over a part of what she had helped build while remaining part of the collective.
Her blessing was filled with hopes for the years ahead: that love would remain a foundation, that the community would continue to trust and show up for one another, that it would remain curious, embrace conflict as a pathway to growth, protect its dignity, rest, dream boldly and never lose sight of the people and values at the heart of the work.
It was a fitting reflection of Azadi's journey: leadership that does not belong to one person, but grows when it is shared.
“Azadi Community will prove otherwise and make love a popular movement because that’s the heritage that I want as I need to have. And I affirm that yours will be the kind of love that Toni Morrison spoke of when she wrote, “Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all” . May our love for one another never be thin. May it always be thick. May it always make us warm. And for those that have felt this love, may it make you feel comfortable so that you belong.“ - Sophie Otiende.
The Archive We Choose: Stories told with dignity and agency
The celebration also opened the doors to Azadi's 5th Ethical Storytelling Exhibition, The Archive We Choose.
For Azadi, storytelling has never been simply about producing content.
Since 2021, ethical storytelling has been one of the quiet cornerstones of the community's work, grounded in consent, dignity, agency and the belief that people have the right to determine how their stories are told.
The exhibition created space for fellows to share their stories through art and invited visitors to experience storytelling differently.
Not as something extracted from people.
Not as stories reduced to statistics.
But as experiences carrying complexity, beauty, pain, survival, imagination and possibility.
As Sophie reflected during the celebration, numbers matter, but stories tell us something numbers cannot.
The truth is in the story. The pain is in the story. The joy is in the story. The survival is in the story.
The Archive We Choose was therefore more than an exhibition. It was an affirmation that survivors can write themselves into history on their own terms.
Five Years of Choosing Community
Five years of Azadi have shown that community is not something that simply happens because people share a space. It is something that is built, nurtured and chosen, again and again.
For Azadi, that choice has often lived in the smallest moments. It is in checking in on one another, celebrating birthdays, sharing a meal, making room for rest, showing up when someone is going through a difficult time and creating rituals that remind people that they belong. These moments may not always look like the big milestones that make headlines but they are part of the foundation that has held the community together.
Azadi has also learned that building community does not mean always agreeing or always getting things right. There have been difficult conversations, disagreements, changes of mind and moments when people have had to find new ways of relating to one another. Yet, through all of this, the community has continued to learn that conflict can be part of growth and that sometimes staying in the room long enough to listen, understand and change is itself an act of care.
At the heart of it all is a simple belief: people should not have to earn dignity, belonging or care. They should be able to find spaces where they can be fully themselves, dream freely and experience the ordinary joys of being in community.
That is what Azadi has been choosing for five years.
And it is a choice the community intends to keep making.
Looking ahead...
If the first five years were about discovering what Azadi could become, the next five are an invitation to imagine what is possible when that foundation is carried forward with intention.
The launch of the Strategic Plan 2026–2030 marks this next chapter. It gives shape to a future that has been taking form through years of learning, questioning and collective work. But it is not a departure from the Azadi that has existed for the past five years. It is a continuation of it.
The questions may become bigger. The work may evolve. The community will undoubtedly encounter new challenges and discover new possibilities along the way. But the values at the centre remain: freedom, leadership, care, dignity, community and the belief that survivors should have agency over their own lives and futures.
Azadi's future is therefore not about predicting exactly what the next five years will look like. It is about remaining curious enough to adapt, courageous enough to question what no longer serves the community and imaginative enough to dream beyond the limits of the present.
For a community that has always believed in futures that did not yet exist, this feels like a natural next step.
The invitation is to keep dreaming and then to do the slow, collective work of making those dreams real.
A Community Built Together
None of this journey has been possible alone. Over the past five years, Azadi has been held and strengthened by friends, partners, collaborators and funders who have believed in the vision, supported the work and walked alongside the community through different seasons. Your trust, solidarity, resources, ideas and willingness to build with us have made these five years richer and more meaningful. We are deeply grateful to everyone who has been part of this journey in ways both big and small. As we look ahead, we hope to continue learning, dreaming and building together, creating the kind of future that becomes possible when we choose community and walk together.
Here Is to the Next Chapter
As the celebration came to a close, there was much to look back on: five years of relationships built, lessons learned, difficult questions asked, dreams pursued and a community that has continued to grow.
But there was also something else in the room a sense that this milestone was not an ending.
It was a beginning.
Five years ago, Azadi started as a small group of survivors asking what reintegration could look like if community, agency and belonging were placed at the centre. Today, that question has grown into a living community that continues to challenge what is considered possible.
The celebration was therefore not simply a moment to say, look how far we have come.
It was also a moment to say, look at where we can still go.
There is more to learn. More stories to tell. More dreams to pursue. More ways to care for one another and more possibilities to imagine.
And so, as Azadi begins its next chapter, it carries forward the lessons of the first five years: that leadership can be shared, that care is powerful, that rest matters, that stories belong to the people who live them, and that no one has to build the future alone.
Here is to continuing to choose community.
Here is to dreaming boldly, building patiently and growing together.
Watch the 5th Anniversary Celebration: https://youtu.be/l0GBqCb4x2Y?si=abmvlGOjS8sSpmNd
🥂Here is to Azadi🥳💃
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