It Takes a Network
The first few months of the pandemic brought global lockdowns and travel restrictions that appeared to grind the world to a halt. Workers in the anti-trafficking sector were asked “has trafficking reduced?” Unfortunately, it was quite the opposite.
The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime reported in their Global Organised Crime Index that the reach and further exploitation opportunities of traffickers increased. As the systematic fault lines of inequalities and vulnerabilities were deepened, victims of trafficking and vulnerable migrants were left with few options when considering migration or returning home.
In their findings, The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime calls for further collaboration on a global level in attempts to meet the complex challenges of disrupting human trafficking. As The Global Learning Community (GLC) experienced the pivots and challenges of the pandemic, the community took this moment to consider the history and future of the project.
The Global Learning Community was started by Chab Dai in 2012 after more than seven years experience in building a coordinated and informed response to trafficking in Cambodia. The GLC project continued to grow with an increasingly global focus of anti-trafficking work, and worked to provide support and services to this community of grassroots organisations with a passion for professional and meaningful interventions and programmes in Asia, Africa and America. With intentional, relational growth, members cultivated a space for honest and safe conversations around the challenges, success and growing pains of the movement. GLC members valued the opportunities to dig deep into how to build stronger programs organizational capacity, create monitoring and evaluation frameworks and realise the need for equitable and ethical research.
In 2020, in response to the global challenges and massive programme shifts organisations were experiencing the GLC, Helen Sworn, the Executive Director of Chab Dai and champion of the project, organised an evaluation to consider if the GLC remained relevant to the movement and it could be strengthened. This process intersected with the global restrictions brought on by COVID 19 where many organisations found themselves highly limited and many were pushed to consider how the pandemic will change the sector's response to the problem. The evaluation collected the experiences and thoughts of GLC members with the specific aim of understanding how the GLC could meet their needs, strengthen network and coalition building and generally, to determine what was needed to meaningfully help and connect grassroots anti-trafficking organisations.
The findings of the evaluation provided key insights into the priorities of the community, which were focused around:
a desire to work more closely together to improve systems and practices
elevate the collective voice of grassroots organisations
push for rigorous research and monitoring, evaluation and learning
The evaluation highlighted community members' interest in:
building stronger connections with fellow members
co-working on projects that would be accessible and beneficial to the broader grassroots anti-trafficking community.
Drawing from the findings of the evaluation and the rich process of taking a sabbatical, Helen began to work with the community to transition the GLC from a Chab Dai project to a cooperative community project. This process began open and dynamic conversations around the vision, mission and core values of the project, further clarifying a project focus on supporting, inspiring and growing one another as the anti-trafficking and modern slavery movement.
Drawing from the insights presented in the book The Starfish and the Spider, Helen presented the concept of how the structure of a collaborative community would highly influence participation and engagement with members. The conversations unpacked the concepts of creating ‘waterholes’ where individuals can come and go as needed or of how organisations can use ‘fences’ that create boundaries for inclusion. Moving forward, the process of reflection, evaluation and the embrace of iteration has positioned the GLC to strengthen not only the existing membership but support and grow the grassroots anti-trafficking sector.
by Dr Leah Edwards, Monitoring Learning and Evaluation Consultant
The Global Learning Community
