Leading Canada’s first participatory, leadership capacity building research projects with those with the lived experience of violence, exploitation, and human trafficking to investigate preventative root causes.
The Context: Canada’s response to supporting those with lived experience of modern slavery is in its infancy. There is a push towards Survivor-led approaches to ensure services are appropriate. However, there is limited work evaluating the root causes that could lead to a stronger preventative focus. This results in a large burden for those with lived experience to have to “fix” the systems designed to help them.
Why This Project Matters: This project uses a unique participatory design that centers the Survivor experience, challenges organizations across multiple sectors to improve service access, pushes past victim-blaming, post-abuse approaches and instead focuses on societal root causes that can lead to effective prevention strategies.
What We Are Doing: Leading a Canada-wide research project using a participatory model in partnership with The Salvation Army Illuminate, including research design, ethical storytelling policies, literature review, lived experience stakeholder advisory and practicums, trauma informed research questions, collecting and analyzing data (ethics review, qualitative interviews and survey), reporting results and hosting learning circles across Canada.
