Philanthropy shapes the field, but donors have also been shaped by their detractors

To mark Beyond Trafficking and Slavery's tenth anniversary, we are releasing a new feature which reflects on how the anti-trafficking field has evolved, and where it might be – or should be – going in the future. As part of this project we sat down with Ryan Heman, the head of the global supply chains team at Humanity United (and our principal funder for many years). The conversation focused upon two main themes: learning and adaption, and funding and its effects.

Funding is the essential lubricant that drives anti-trafficking forward. It both constrains and enables organisations and individuals in ways that are often hard to see from the outside. The quest for cash creates powerful incentives to mimic the priorities and languages of funders, and in this way the preferences and perspectives of states, donors, corporations and foundations from the Global North have shaped the anti-trafficking field in profound ways. Civil society organisations have been obliged to both respond to and reinforce funders’ views about the world.

This is particularly true in the case of anti-trafficking, since many organisations who work on related issues have strategically migrated into anti-trafficking circles in the hope of securing more resources. By talking to Ryan we hope to make some of these dynamics more visible, to better understand how the field looks from a funder standpoint, and to critically reflect upon the position of BTS within this funding ecosystem.

We greatly appreciate Ryan sharing his thoughts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Joel Quirk (BTS): How did you come to be working for a philanthropic foundation with a specific focus on human trafficking, modern slavery and forced labour?

Ryan Heman (Humanity United): My career in philanthropy started at The Philanthropy Workshop. It was an educational firm trying to move high net worth individuals from passive cheque-writing to active engagement.

At the time, Humanity United (HU) was funding The Philanthropy Workshop to run an immersion programme on human rights philanthropy, which aligned with my hope of establishing a career in human rights. Shortly thereafter I began to work for HU directly – and have held a number of roles over the past decade. Since 2018, my body of work for HU has focused on exploitation in global supply chains.

Joel: How would you describe your relationship to the anti-trafficking field?

Ryan: A lot of my commitment stems from trying to bring my own queer experience and lens to the human trafficking field. The anti-trafficking sector has harmed queer populations in many ways, but I stayed in the field because I felt it needed to be critiqued. Ten years on, I would say that the anti-trafficking field has developed significantly. Harmful narratives have, to a certain degree, now been unpacked.

Joel: Many people come into anti-trafficking with optimism and enthusiasm, and then get increasingly world weary over time. Have you done the opposite?

Ryan: I definitely entered philanthropy and anti-trafficking as a critic, and I remain a critic. But my views have become more nuanced as I’ve gotten older and the ways I lean into my values have changed. I’ve become more pragmatic about the world.

I also think there is much more variation within the field than some appreciate. From the inside, I’m well-positioned to articulate how things are more complex than they appear from the outside.

Joel: One of the key issues here is whether or not people and organisations working on anti-trafficking issues have been able to evolve and learn from past mistakes. How much learning do you think has actually taken place over the last decade or so?

Ryan: One example of learning might be the renewed emphasis on survivor leadership. It has been a real journey for foundations, nonprofits, and organisations to understand that, if we’re here to support survivors, we actually need to centre survivors’ ideas – and ownership of the solutions which are implemented. We’re not where we need to be yet, but that is one of the big steps that I hope we will continue to lean into.

Joel: The field was in an ideological fight over sex work in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but this seems to have died down over the last decade, at least in some circles. Is there less friction now than there was in the past? Or perhaps some new players who are less invested in this polarised debate?

Ryan: It’s true that, during the early days of the movement, organisations fought over where they stood on sex work vs. sex trafficking. HU’s perspective at the time was that the preponderance of trafficking was actually labour trafficking, so we tried to stay out of the debate.

Today there is more emphasis on labour trafficking across the movement. There are a few pockets where sex work/sex trafficking remains a contentious issue. But it is no longer disrupting the field and stealing momentum from us.

Joel: This also comes down to how the field is imagined. I hear lots of people talking about an anti-trafficking movement, but so many things have been thrown into the mixing bowl. Can we credibly talk about an anti-trafficking movement? Or is it more useful to think in terms of a bunch of loosely related issues – sex work, criminal justice, governance, regulation, labour rights, and more – that have been lumped together under a single label?

Ryan: The ‘anti-trafficking movement’ has become a misnomer. When it was smaller there were those two main camps we just talked about. But it has splintered as it has grown. There are now more people trying to prevent trafficking and/or exploitation than ever before. But not everybody identifies their work as anti-trafficking, and we’re working in pockets rather than as a cohesive movement. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It’s just how we’ve evolved.

We’ve recognised that the field identifying itself as ‘anti-trafficking’ doesn’t address many of the issues contributing to individual experiences of trafficking, smuggling, or forced labour

For me, the ‘movement’ is specifically the survivors’ movement. That’s fairly new and reasonably cohesive. But the wider field of activity is larger than that. There are the folks calling themselves anti-trafficking who, for example, are still working on sex trafficking in really narrow terms. They’re still trying to raid brothels and rescue people. There are also people who have discarded the anti-trafficking label, or who never took it up in the first place, who are working on systems-change topics like labour rights, unionisation, supply chain due diligence, etc.

Reflecting that, HU doesn’t always consider itself to be an anti-trafficking funder – even though our portfolio is on forced labour and human trafficking. We’ve recognised that the field identifying itself as ‘anti-trafficking’ doesn’t address many of the issues contributing to individual experiences of trafficking, smuggling, or forced labour. Its focus is narrower and rarely based in systems-change thinking.

So when HU funds ‘anti-trafficking’ work, it’s just one part of our own effort against trafficking – which focuses on supporting worker & survivor organizing, changing the incentives behind corporate behaviour, and advocating for new solutions in labour migration.

Joel: You say the field has evolved, yet I regularly see people continue to indulge in the worst tropes of trafficking activism: made up statistics, highly stylised violence, vigilante fantasies. Why is that still happening? And how should other actors in the field deal with it?

Ryan: Narratives, especially around sex trafficking, present a specific challenge. It’s not that the field hasn’t moved beyond them – it’s just that the narratives themselves seem very stuck in popular discourse. There have been many attempts over the years to change how the story of human trafficking gets told. They just haven’t been that successful.

Calling out does happen, but at least in the U.S. I would say that there remains a fairly partisan divide on the narrative of trafficking. It’s not always a simple dichotomy between party lines, however. Some of HU’s closest partners, like the McCain Institute, are great exceptions supporting more honest and survivor-centred narratives. They hold groups accountable for their problematic actions, and we greatly value them doing so.

I remember when the film Sound of Freedom came out in 2023. Many anti-trafficking groups came out and said, “no, this is genuinely harmful to survivors,” and “survivors shouldn’t be attacked online for saying this narrative is harmful.” I’m genuinely surprised that happened. It demonstrates that the field really has evolved.

But in anti-trafficking, as in everything else these days, it’s very hard to constructively engage with people you disagree with – especially in America.

Joel: Is it perhaps also that simple sticks, and explaining this stuff in all its complexity is extremely hard? Even specialists in the field struggle to explain how an actual supply chain works. I don’t know how well you can tell a truly layered story to the general public.

Ryan: As somebody in a foundation, I have a different vantage point on this than most people. We work across systems rather narrowly focusing on a single leverage point. Just within my own team, we’re funding journalism, investor engagement, policy advocacy, labour organising, and open data systems.

So while explaining ‘how it all works’ might be difficult, we’re rarely actually trying to do that. With different stakeholders we’re talking about different problems in different ways. We’re code switching all the time.

With our advocacy partners working on the EU’s new Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, we’re talking about corporate sustainability. With labour organisers, we’re talking about collective bargaining and unionisation. With investors, we are talking about antitrust, derisking supply chains, analysing ill-gotten gains, and illicit financial flows. We’re not talking about everything all at once.

Joel: What role does critique, academic or otherwise, play in shaping your work? How much do you engage with people who argue that things have gone off the rails?

Ryan: Folks within philanthropy aren’t averse to critique. Oftentimes we’re funding those critiques. It doesn’t escape me that BTS, which we support, produced a series that was very critical of philanthrocapitalism. And, because you’re a journalism grantee, we didn’t interfere in the production of that.

We often need somebody on the outside to say something for that change to happen on the inside

It’s also easy to forget that people often come to philanthropy from a place of activism. They enter knowing where wealth comes from and holding beliefs around how wealth shouldn’t be generated.

So one way to respond is to say: “keep up the critique.” Changemakers within the philanthropic sector really rely upon critique to push for internal change. We respect external critics, feedback from our partners, and philanthropy support organisations because we often need somebody on the outside to say something for that change to happen on the inside.

Joel: I worry that this is an overly optimistic picture. Many critics of anti-trafficking are frustrated. They feel like they are screaming into the void and nothing comes back. Is there more going on behind the scenes than can be seen from the outside?

Ryan: I think so. I know that when you surveyed readers about your impact, you were surprised by the answers you got. People hadn’t gone out of their way to tell you that you’ve been impactful, but you have been. I can say that my approach to this field was fundamentally informed by the reporting that BTS has done, and I know when I speak to peers across the movement that BTS has had an influence on how they understand the issues.

Similarly, when we go to philanthropy conferences, we talk about Anand Giridharadas’ book Winner Takes All. We talk about Edgar Villanueva’s Decolonizing Wealth. We talk about the critics, and some of them even end up as our keynote speakers. These people are not complete outsiders within the philanthropic sector. Oftentimes they’re pathfinders for us, so we can be more aligned with our values going forward. I would say that, collectively, the sector is intently listening to the critique and using it to make our own case internally.

I think the same thing is happening in the anti-trafficking sector. We hear the critiques. The main reason the ‘anti-trafficking movement’ has become a misnomer – the reason we’ve fractured into pockets of people doing different things – is because the critique drove the movement to understand the problem better, understand the system better, and understand how to engage with the dynamics better.

Joel: I also don’t mean to suggest that anti-trafficking critics have all the answers. In fact, I suspect that “critical anti-trafficking” also suffers from its own blind spots and limitations. Do you think anti-trafficking critiques have also become increasingly repetitive and unreflexive?

Ryan: Stakeholders often tell me they wish the field was better aligned. They think it would be better if everyone were working together for a common goal. But a field with so many diverse actors is a complex system, and those are inherently misaligned. Not everybody inside wants the same thing.

That’s good. It’s productive. If we were all aligned all the time, there would be no one pushing for change. A system needs to be misaligned – it needs to have conflict – in order for new ideas, programmes, and strategies to emerge.

The critics are no more right all the time than the people being critiqued. There are things that BTS has published that we’ve disagreed with – like being completely against raid and rescue. Some people do need intervention by law enforcement to extricate them from impossible situations. That shouldn’t be the only narrative of human trafficking – raid and rescue is the wrong response for plenty of people – but there are those who simply don’t accept that the police need to knock on doors and bust into basements in some scenarios.

Another thing that some critics in the workers’ rights space are challenged by is the idea that they already have a solution: unions. They can be very resistant to seeing where that solution breaks down.

The work is at its most interesting when we stumble upon evidence that suggests our assumptions no longer hold

But we work with migrant worker communities, temporary and transient communities, and seasonal workers. A lot of times unions don’t allow such people to even join. But even if they’re let in, they’re not that invested because, at best, they have a short-term contract. For them unions aren’t the answer. Even in places where you’d think a union would work well, if you talk to migrant workers about it they’ll often just laugh at you. They’ll say unions never supported us, it’ll be too much work, it won’t get recognised. They’ll say there are very good reasons why we’re an informal collective and not a union. The critics struggle a lot to adapt their analysis and prescription to this reality.

A lot of our work at HU is on that edge where our assumptions begin to fail, and that requires us to continually, consistently test them. The work is at its most interesting when we stumble upon evidence that suggests our assumptions no longer hold: the system is changing in ways we didn’t expect, and our partners are responding in ways that we hadn’t thought of. That’s where we focus our learning, so that we’re not just perpetuating a single narrative of how we think change should happen.

Joel: So this is where you end up with a global portfolio with many different intervention points and projects – because it cannot be one size fits all?

Ryan: Our forced labour and human trafficking portfolio is broad. My team focuses on global supply chains, while two other teams work on Asia Pacific seafood and labour migration to the Gulf. We also have a body of work on survivor engagement and survivor leadership.

Across these programmes our leverage areas are corporate accountability, safer labour migration, and worker power. But each team engages differently with those leverage points.

My team supports labour organising up and down supply chains. For example, we’re partnering with specific groups to ensure that the Dindigul Agreement in India, a worker-driven social responsibility programme that addresses gender-based violence and harassment, can be not only negotiated – but implemented. It follows on similar work we’ve supported over the years where partners have wanted to scale enforceable brand agreements.

My team also supports open data solutions for supply chain monitoring. This developed out of our experience with creating a venture capital fund called Working Capital a few years ago. Through that work, we learned that an ecosystem full of proprietary tools does not necessarily help civil society actors, investors, or even governments, because they can’t access that proprietary data. Our open data strategy is actually an internal learning response to our past work and the existing ecosystem of enterprise solutions.

At the same time, we are also working to get investors to screen their portfolios and engage in shareholder activism. It’s a step forward, but not the end goal. Ideally investors would be held liable if they knowingly invested in companies that have abuses happening within their supply chains.

So, we’re doing all of the above – and much more. Most actors in a movement are limited to having one major activity: for example, only impact litigation, or only labour organising, or only advocacy. Philanthropy gets to consider all the tools in the toolkit.

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Joel: This approach seems to involve a high level of flexibility, but this isn’t true for other funders. A huge chunk of anti-trafficking funding involves service agreements between the state and downstream providers. How does state funding differ to private funding?

Ryan: One huge thing that separates philanthropy from state funding is the scale. Governments can fund at a level the rest of us simply can’t.

If you ask any nonprofit in the world, they will probably tell you that government grants are very difficult. They’re difficult to apply to, they’re difficult to receive, and they’re difficult to report on. Philanthropy is more willing to streamline than governments will ever be. Not that all foundations are incredibly streamlined, but state funding tends to be more burdensome.

They also fund different things. Foundations aren’t always in the business of funding basic services like shelters and social workers – that’s often left to governments. Private foundations try to work strategically at the level of systems change. This is why you find them working on things like advocacy or solution innovation – to try to change the way governments approach issues.

Joel: Foundations like HU are all based in the Global North. They work with partners in the Global South, but it remains a hierarchical system. Does that concern the foundations?

Ryan: Many foundations are paying attention to the need for localisation. Some are restructuring to provide more resources and more decision-making power to regional intermediaries, and to support ‘backbone organisations’ which themselves move money to the movement.

There’s also increasing emphasis on shifting power within the anti-trafficking sector. But there are legal restrictions on what we can fund. We might want to fund a grassroots collective, for example, but oftentimes they don’t have the documents needed to set that up. Sometimes you can find ways to do it, sometimes you can’t. We’re well aware we need to shift power, but we also face restrictions in what we can do.

We also have to think about safeguarding. Sometimes giving a grant to an organisation puts a target on its back. Before doing so, we have to ask ourselves questions like “are we in a position to fund evacuation for these activists?” These are real concerns: we’ve had partners who have been detained and deported because their writing has been identified.

Joel: I’ve been hearing of late that the pool of funds is drying up, and that the grant-givers of the world are going through some extreme turbulence. What does the future look like?

Ryan: When it comes to anti-trafficking and civil society in general, there have been major changes to the funding landscape that are really chilling for the entire world.

For starters, some of the largest funders of human rights have sunset programmes or pivoted their focus areas toward work that’s perhaps at the intersection of, but not specifically anti-trafficking. We know many of our partners have faced drastic cuts in foundation funding due to shifting priorities, and some of the largest private funders of human rights have announced they will be shutting down entirely. Hopefully we’ll see some of these resources come back to the field under new mandates, but it remains a challenge that private funders seem to be shifting their priorities at a moment of heightened precarity around the world.

Public funding through governments and multilaterals is also evaporating—most notably with the end of USAID, but more specifically with the cuts to ILAB at the U.S. Department of Labor. These cuts have been existential across so many human rights movements. To be clear though, the decrease of U.S. overseas development assistance is part of a larger trend. Governments across Europe – the UK included – are also decreasing their funding.

It’s a hard landscape right now. The entire human rights sector is reeling from this. At HU, we’re trying to respond by pivoting how we work. We’re recognizing a greater need for us to be working at the system-level, collaborating with other donors and using tools like strategic convening and voice to make a case for supporting human rights movements.

Joel: Any last thoughts?

Ryan: Overall, I’d say our perspective is that forced labour is not a bug of the global economy, but a major feature. The current global economy was built to produce forced labour – it’s not just a random side effect. This is why we are pursuing a systems change strategy: the incentives for stakeholders need to change.

We support workers and migrants to collectively organise and demand their rights. We work with investors to help them change the incentives for corporations, so in turn the latter changes its behaviour. We work with policymakers to change the regulatory framework so investors and corporations have to respond differently. And, we support journalism and advocacy to help change the expectations and the responsibility of consumers and the public.

These stakeholders are never all going to be on the same page. Nevertheless, we need a preponderance of those stakeholders to change their viewpoint and to change their aspirations for what value the global economy ought to preserve.

I first drew a map of this system ten years ago. We’re trying to change the incentives, so that when I redraw that map in ten more years it will look very different. That will be the work of my life.