Atrocity Prevention: Building the voice and will of the United States

One of Humanity United’s primary priorities since its earliest days has been helping governments and institutions—including the United States—in their efforts to prevent atrocities and, when necessary, respond more effectively to them.

In 2012 Humanity United, along with many genocide-prevention advocates, celebrated a historic milestone when President Obama made a landmark speech on the need to prevent and respond to atrocities, introducing critical new initiatives.

The timeline on this page captures key highlights in the field building up to this event, beginning in 2007 when Humanity United began supporting two instrumental projects aimed at promoting genocide prevention as a national U.S. priority, and helping to develop practical policy recommendations to enhance the capacity of the U.S. government to respond to emerging threats of genocide and mass atrocities—the Genocide Prevention Task Force (GPTF) and the Mass Atrocities Response Operations (MARO) project.

Tracing Forced Labor in Our Products: Gold, shrimp, and palm oil

In the 2011 Performance Report, we introduced Humanity United’s “virtuous cycle” approach to our corporate engagement program. Here, we follow-up on what we identified as our immediate priority in the cycle: identifying and removing slavery-tainted commodities from international supply chains.

Multinational corporations have a unique role in helping eradicate modern-day slavery. One critical action they can take is to identify and address exploitation in agricultural and extractive commodities deep within their international supply chains, because this is the level where the most severe instances of forced labor and exploitation occur.

Following an extensive two-year research process comparing 25 slavery-tainted commodities, Humanity United identified three priority products: gold, palm oil, and shrimp. We chose to focus our work on these three commodities because we believe they represent the industries in which slavery is not only most prevalent, but also where we and others can have the most impact. Researching, mapping, and exposing where forced labor exists in these commodity chains comprised the bulk of our 2012 grant-making in the Corporate Engagement program.

Click on the Commodities Map to the right to learn more about this work.

Humanity United Partners With Obama Administration to Launch Two Critical Human Rights Initiatives

In 2012 Humanity United announced two partnerships with the Obama Administration aimed at creating solutions to some of the 21st century’s most intractable problems. The Partnership for Freedom looks to find new solutions to the challenge of modern-day slavery in the United States, while the Tech Challenge for Atrocity Prevention looks to find new, technology-based solutions to the tragedies of mass rape, killings, and other atrocities.

Both initiatives are important examples of our core commitment to collaboration, alignment, and collective impact as the most effective ways to tackle large-scale and hard-to-solve human problems. They also signal our support for partnerships between public and private entities based on our belief in the benefits of combining the reach of governments with the flexibility of private philanthropic dollars.

APRIL 2012

Tech Challenge for Atrocity Prevention

Announced as part of President Obama’s broader atrocity-prevention strategy, the goal of this joint project between Humanity United and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is to develop innovative solutions to five specific atrocity-prevention challenges, as well as to educate and engage the broader technology community on atrocity-prevention issues.

The first round launched in October 2012, awarding prizes of up to $5,000 for individuals and groups who proposed the most innovative ideas for how to better identify third-party enablers of atrocities and how to better document evidence of atrocities. Applicants from 22 countries submitted 88 innovative technology proposals responding to two challenges: identifying, spotlighting and deterring third-party enablers of atrocities; or documenting evidence of atrocities to hold perpetrators accountable. Seven innovations won a combination of first place prizes of $5,000; second place prizes of $3,000; or third place prizes of $2,000.

SEPTEMBER 2012

Partnership for Freedom

On Sept. 25, 2012, President Obama gave a historic speech on human trafficking—one of the most significant speeches on slavery in the United States since President Abraham Lincoln. In it, President Obama announced Humanity United’s Partnership for Freedom—a joint initiative with the White House, the Department of Justice, and other federal agencies—to surface, support, and scale new solutions to some of the persistent challenges facing those who work to prevent human trafficking in the Unites States, and those who care for trafficking survivors in communities across the country.

The $6 million challenge will launch in 2013 and will aim to identify new approaches in three core areas—housing resources and housing opportunities for formerly trafficked individuals, comprehensive care management for victims of trafficking, and engagement with the law enforcement community to identify and support victims of trafficking. The challenge will award grants to the most innovative approaches that can be evaluated and scaled nationally. Humanity United is leading challenge design and outreach, and is working with the U.S. government to identify new private and corporate partners, including Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Women Initiative, which is a founding supporter of this project.

Celebrating Its First Five Years: The Alliance to End Slavery & Trafficking

Like many who are new to the U.S. anti-human-trafficking issue, Humanity United’s early leaders quickly observed in the mid-2000s that the emerging movement was ripe with experts and ideas but, due to the complex nature of the field, was fragmented and missing the “sticky” relationships that make movements effective.

What we refer to as “modern-day slavery” is an umbrella term for a complex phenomenon, ranging from sex trafficking to forced labor, from exploiting lawful workers in the construction trade to the use of foreign labor recruiters that cause debt bondage. Definitions, critical to developing a coherent policy, were divisive, and service providers, each individually focused on particular manifestations of the crime both within and outside of the United States, competed for limited federal resources.

As a nascent funder in this arena, Humanity United was eager to support a platform to bring U.S. anti-slavery leaders together—creating a common ground for practitioners across the spectrum in a number of geographic locations. The opportunity: To build a policy-focused coalition to advance U.S. anti-trafficking efforts.

Initially launched as a pilot project in 2007, the Alliance to End Slavery & Trafficking (ATEST) has grown to become the pre-eminent voice in Washington, D.C. policy discussions on all aspects of modern-day slavery. Composed of 12 member organizations—focused individually on topics ranging from forced labor in Florida’s tomato fields to sex trafficking and debt bondage in India—ATEST has achieved tremendous progress throughout its first five years.

CAST & the Survivor Advocacy Caucus

The Coalition to Abolish Slavery & Trafficking (CAST) is one of Humanity United’s earliest grantees, and a longtime partner as one of the founding members of ATEST. The Los Angeles–based service provider—one of the country’s first to focus on human trafficking survivors—is also a powerful advocate in the state of California and inside the beltway of Washington, D.C.

“CAST’s work is directly informed by the real experiences of the clients it serves. Through a unique organizing approach, CAST launched the Survivor Advisory Caucus, a one-of-a-kind leadership-development program where members of the Caucus organize to speak publicly on behalf of all survivors of trafficking.”

Launched in 2003, a time when executive director Kay Buck noticed an absence in survivor voices in critical advocacy discussions, the caucus provides a space for CAST graduates to transform themselves into advocates, organizers, and leaders. Much like the individualized support they received as CAST clients, caucus members are provided with a range of options, from leadership development to media training.

“CAST is known for a survivor-centered approach to ending modern day slavery. And what that means is we work with survivors in a less traditional way,” said Kay Buck, executive director. “We see them as partners in informing the overall anti-slavery movement. And so we provide direct services to them—shelter, legal services, case management—but the whole time we're really taking a more individualized approach to help them achieve their goals and rebuild their lives.”

Survivor experiences inform CAST’s advocacy initiatives, and caucus members have taken on leading roles, from Sacramento to Washington, D.C. The caucus has inspired other survivors to speak out, evolving to support the National Survivor Network—a scaled-up version of the caucus to support survivors across the United States. Members are incredibly diverse: U.S. citizens and foreign nationals who have experienced a variety of forms of human trafficking and modern-day slavery.

“It’s gratifying to see that it’s really taken off, considering that it was so controversial to empower survivors in that particular way back in 2003,” Buck said. “That tells us that things have really changed. There’s more openness to organizations admitting that we don’t know it all. That we really do need the advice and expertise of the people who are impacted most by our services, by our programs, and, most importantly, I think, by the policies that we’re all trying to create in Washington and, for us, in Sacramento.”

Supporting Civil Society

BUILDING CAPACITY THROUGH LOCAL FUNDERS

Social change requires communities to be both informed and engaged. Elevating voice and will in the places where we work is a core pillar in Humanity United’s three-pronged strategy.

One of Humanity United’s primary objectives is developing highly functional and well-coordinated networks or civil society organizations in the countries where we operate. As a U.S.-based foundation, it’s often most effective to work with partners on the ground, who provide additional capacity to identify, vet, and manage local grantees.

Since 2008, Humanity United has partnered with funders who have an on-the-ground presence in Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to support civil society organizations in these countries. These partnerships have also helped us develop clear lessons-learned on how best to support local organizations in conflict and post-conflict environments.

Learning: Begin with broad civil society funding to identify key levers

EXAMPLE: EASTERN CONGO INITIATIVE (ECI)
COUNTRY: DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

Our engagement with ECI began when Humanity United was still developing its DRC country strategy. Founded in March 2010 by Ben Affleck, with support from Humanity United, the ECI is a grant-making, capacity-building, and advocacy organization entirely focused on working with and for the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The partnership with ECI provided an excellent opportunity to connect with key civil society actors on the ground. As our country strategy continues to mature and evolve, supporting Congolese civil society will remain a key part of our overall DRC strategy.

However, our civil society support also expanded in 2012 to focus on community initiatives that contribute to specific program objectives—specifically, those that help civil society members engage the Congolese government on the way it manages the country’s natural resources and increases the amount of information publicly available on the subject. To that end, we also supported other complimentary initiatives including:

• A 2012 grant to the Carter Center, which aims to increase civil society efficacy to work with government and ensure more transparency in the mining sector.
• Through Partnership Africa Canada, we are also funding local organizations in the natural resource sector to help them develop technical knowledge (e.g. monitoring and reporting skills) in the complex conflict minerals sector which, in turn, hones their ability to serve as effective watchdogs, protecting the interests of the broader Congolese population.

Build monitoring and evaluation capacity by helping to create reporting tools

EXAMPLE: TRUSTAFRICA
COUNTRY: LIBERIA

Civil society groups often need assistance to develop their capacity to measure and report on their activities and, most importantly, their impact. Such was the case in Liberia, where Humanity United provided both funding and technical assistance to local organizations via our partner TrustAfrica, an African foundation with staff in Liberia who helped us to identify and support promising grantees. Reporting is critical to third-party funders like Humanity United and to securing support from additional funders, and reporting efficacy varied widely among our TrustAfrica grantees. So we worked with local staff to create standardized reporting, assessment, and learning templates that could help local organizations better track their impact. This was an iterative process, which relied heavily on TrustAfrica’s ability to understand the changing needs of our local partners.

These new reporting procedures were introduced in September 2012, via a one-day workshop in Montserrado County, and are currently in use with 10 grantees. These procedures have also improved TrustAfrica’s ability to evaluate their grantees and assess their work in the field.