The Freedom Rising program is a transformative leadership program designed to support and connect frontline leaders—especially women and survivors—to challenge the systems enabling exploitation in their communities. The program works to build trust and collaboration among organisations addressing various forms of exploitation, including child labour, bonded labour, sex trafficking and forced marriage.
The power of social networks
Social networks are crucial for an effective and influential anti-slavery movement. They facilitate the sharing of information, ideas and resources, promoting solidarity and collective actions. Despite their importance, relationship and network building initiatives are often considered abstract and intangible, and are largely left out of intervention models and measurement efforts. Social Network Analysis—analysing patterns of relationships among people in groups—brings rigour to the study of networks as well as strategic insights to those looking to strengthen them.
Insights from our latest study
A newly released study by Ignited Word and the Freedom Fund uses Social Network Analysis to empirically measure and assess the network of Freedom Rising leaders in Brazil, including the nature and strength of relationships between individuals and organisations. The study serves as a baseline to measure change over time and guides how the network can be grown and made more inclusive, particularly for people with lived experience of slavery and from other marginalised backgrounds.
Key findings
- Emerging clusters: Despite the program’s recent launch, clusters (groups of people interacting with each other) are already present, revealing a naturally high level of interconnectedness within the anti-slavery movement in Brazil. However, there is significant room for growth in the network.
- Information vs. resource sharing: Freedom Rising participants primarily interact to share information, with far fewer connections to share resources. Participants identified this “scarcity mindset” as the biggest challenge for the movement, as a competitive funding environment discourages resource sharing.
- Survivors’ connectivity and influence: More than 25 percent of survivors have no connection to other survivors, and survivors have half the number of connections compared to non-survivors. Additionally, fewer survivors are seen as influential or as leaders within the network.
Recommendations for movement building
The infrastructure of movement building: A social network analysis baseline of the Freedom Rising Brazil program offers several recommendations to bolster collaboration among participants and organisations:
- Encourage direct connection and collaboration among sub-groups, rather than relying on the Freedom Rising program as a central coordination hub.
- Foster stronger survivor-to-survivor relationships to improve their connectivity and collective influence within the network.
- Adopt an assets-based lens (building on the positive rather than trying to fix what’s broken) to leverage shared priorities and aspirations, to foster greater solidarity within the network.
Click below to access the report:
