How Enterprise Can Fight Slavery: The Freedom Business Alliance
We talked to Jennifer Roemhildt Tunehag about the Freedom Business Alliance initiative and the upcoming Freedom Business Forum.
We are hearing the term Freedom Business being used more and more, what is a ‘Freedom Business’?
It’s a business that exists to fight human trafficking. There are several types of business that fit into this category: businesses that create jobs for survivors of exploitation would be the most familiar, but we would also include businesses that hire vulnerable people in order to prevent exploitation, as well as the aggregators who take products from these first two to new markets. A fourth category would be businesses that provide services specifically to and for other freedom businesses (ie., communications, logistics support, etc). Finally, there are businesses who have devoted the profit from their companies to fight trafficking. These are also part of the freedom business ecosystem.
We sometimes call freedom business the ‘backwards business’. In a normal business paradigm, an entrepreneur sees an opportunity to create a product or service that meets a need in the market. By gathering a qualified staff, he sets himself up to make a profit.
In contrast, a freedom business starts with the group of people it intends to employ. In businesses working to prevent human trafficking and exploitation, those people have been made vulnerable by poverty, lack of education, or other challenging variables. For those in business for restoration, the difficulties are greater. Their employees have already been victimised, and the resulting trauma creates levels of complexity in life and employment.
The Freedom Business Alliance believes that business can be a powerful tool in the holistic restoration of individuals and the transformation of their communities. Because employment is an important aspect of human dignity, freedom businesses offer opportunities to people whose main qualification is the need for a job.
Can you share more about how the Freedom Business Alliance came about and why?
The Freedom Business Alliance (FBA) emerged from the BAM Global Think Tank. My husband Mats Tunehag, Co-chair of the Think Tank, suggested that we form an Issue Group to look at BAM and human trafficking globally – an issue that I was keen to explore.
A group of 30 business and ministry practitioners from nine countries worked together to assess the health, problems, and possibilities of the global freedom business movement, specifically focusing on BAM as prevention and restoration in situations of human trafficking. The result was BAM Think Tank paper on BAM and Human Trafficking which is available as a free download.
The Issue Group met daily during the 2013 BAM consultation in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and expanded to include others who were passionate about freedom business. We concluded that, rather than being complete, our work had just begun! Over 18 months, the Think Tank group had identified crucial needs that limited success in freedom business, and opportunities which could only be seized by joint effort – including the need for mentoring, information, and resources, and the opportunity to access those things by building a trade association.
The Freedom Business Alliance emerged from those meetings with a commission to design solutions based on the think tank recommendations. After a two-year process, FBA is now officially registered in the United States, and will host its first board meetings prior to the Atlanta conference in January.
We like to say that freedom businesses exist to fight human trafficking. The Freedom Business Alliance exists to help them succeed.
Can you share some brief examples of the kind of business that are part of FBA – and how the FBA is supporting such companies?
Jewelry, home goods, and fashion accessories currently dominate in freedom goods, followed by cafes and other food service (bakeries, restaurants, and catering). Some freedom businesses are venturing into socially conscious fashion, and others are using design skills for communication, doing web design and consulting to assist businesses in telling their story.
Many are founded by NGOs, and function in the space between charity and business models. For instance, freedom businesses often benefit from the seconded labour of missionaries or foreign staff who do not draw salaries from the business. They may solicit donations to supplement sales and enable them to sell products at reasonable prices despite paying a living wage (generally higher than the industry average) to empoyees. Despite hard work from devoted staff, the average freedom business is not profitable.
The Freedom Business Alliance focuses on helping businesses access the resources they need to be profitable, scalable, and transformational. FBA aims to help shape the vision of these companies – and ultimately, the bottom line. We are also working to find new models for freedom business, freedom business 2.0, as it were.
The inaugural Freedom Business Forum is going to be in this August, tell us more about your goals for that and why people should come.
In response to the concrete business needs of freedom businesses, the FBA is hosting a global forum of freedom business entrepreneurs this August in Chiang Mai, Thailand. We see the event as a “one stop shop” for strategic solutions. The Forum will feature inspiring plenaries, informative (and interactive) workshops that focus on the real needs of freedom businesses, one-on-one mentoring sessions with industry experts, and plenty of networking opportunities.
Conference Details:
Freedom Business Forum, Chiang Mai, Thailand
Venue: Imperial Mae Ping Hotel
Dates: August 20-24, 2017 (Sunday evening to Wednesday evening); optional site visit to freedom businesses in Cambodia following the conference
Why you should attend:
- Find and follow a path to profitability
- Build community for your freedom journey
- Connect to strategic opportunities
- Use your business to profit FOR people, not from them
- Engage with and contribute to the Freedom Business movement
Visit the Freedom Business Alliance website for more information
Jennifer Roemhildt Tunehag in conversation with Jo Plummer, Editor of The BAM Review.
Find out more about the Freedom Business Forum and Register
Jennifer Roemhildt Tunehag founded Nea Zoi, a ministry to exploited people in Athens, Greece, in 1998. She is also a founder and core team member of the European Freedom Network, a network of faith-based NGOs working to build a bridge to freedom across Europe. Jennifer was one of the facilitators for the BAM Global Think Tank group focusing on “Business as Mission and Human Trafficking”, exploring the potential of business to function for prevention and restoration in situations of human trafficking. Recommendations from that group became the impetus for starting FBA. Jennifer also serves on the Human Trafficking Task Force of the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA). She and her husband, Mats, live in Stockholm, Sweden (and other warmer places in winter!).
Picture credit: Freedom Business Alliance
Part of this interview was first published in November 2015 and has been updated with information about the Freedom Business Forum.
