In this talk, Sharon Prince stresses the urgent need for a comprehensive, collaborative ecosystem to eliminate forced labor from supply chains. She argues that no single sector can solve the problem alone and outlines the inclusion of diverse stakeholders—CEOs, industry leaders, media, government agencies, universities, and students—ensuring gender and racial parity in the working group. Prince describes the development of an industry toolkit for transparency (not yet a certification) and the launch of the first industry report in 2020, which identified 30 working‑group members. She highlights pilot projects on three continents, citing specific examples such as the "Shadow of a Face" monument (Harriet Tubman), the Black Chapel in London, the Canaan Library project, and a large bridge construction in India involving a major industrialist. The initiative is expanding, with new RFPs and recent announcements of five additional projects, including a partnership with the Karsh Institute of Democracy at the University of Virginia, signaling a scaling of the movement.
Chapters
From the very get go. The urgency of this situation really made me think about having the full ecosystem to really come together. It's not just one sector that's responsible. You'll see in blue might be a little terribly difficult. Well, you can see it. Yeah, these are the pressure points that you do have agency. So whether it be owners and developers, there's an owner's project requirement. You could say you can't actually right now have a fully ethical supply chain without forced labor, but you can determine a subset you have. Media is important in terms of awareness. Government agencies on contracts and extractives and manufacturers. Obviously documenting as a university being able to initialize research which I'll tell you about is happening at Stanford right now, then the public demand, that's a very important part of the equation. So bringing people around the table. And the idea from the get go is that we need CEOs and industry leaders to be a part of the working group because we want them to be able to make immediate decisions. And how does that happen? You ask them everything that most everything it sounds like, oh, you had connections. No, I asked those who built Grace Farms and then I asked them to say who else do you know? Let's ask them. And we're going to have gender parity on this. Looking at also in terms of gender, racial parity, trying to make sure that's part of our concept of how we want to create that team. And did so. And then the next part that's really important too is to have you as university students. Really this is a gift to be here because the you as university students are able to imagine the future but like I said without being tethered. And we're now have been engaged with probably 25 universities and I think it's a very important part of being able to for you to carry the baton. So our first industry report, we formally launched the movement 2020 and those working group members, 30 of them were part of that are part of it. You can see it in the report. And then people ask okay, just tell me which one of those materials are nay without forced labor. Well, we're at the beginning of the movement. We need the transparency. So we did start to say, okay, you have to use a toolkit. It's not going to be a certification out there already. We have to create it. We have to start to. We developed a toolkit for the industry to start using and they are then our creative director, Chelsea Thatcher, one of the co authors on the report along with the former ambassador on modern slavery. She said okay, what are we going to do next? Again asking the questions, what's next? Now we need to have pilot projects. Here they are. They're in locations on three different continents. This is in three years time. Three continents. And that means you have to get the whole team like an owner, the architect, engineer, construction managers agree to do this. And so we had three continents, 12 projects and one really beautiful project that aligns is Shadow of a Face with Nina Cook John, which is the Harriet Tubman monument that replaced Christopher Columbus monument. See that shadow of a face? It's really extraordinary. And Black Chapel again, limited materials in London at the beginning. And then we had a full scale project in the Canaan Library. Turn construction is on this project and you'll see how now they have adopted Design for Freedom and are committed as well as Miller Knoll, a top firm too. And then the bridge in India, this is now a bigger project, a million square feet. And it's with one of the key industrialists there, Sunil Minjali in India, where there is the highest number of those in slave conditions. So it's pretty bold to do that too Then our team is now starting to get RFPs for new projects. One of them that we just announced. We announced five new ones last week at the summit. And Karsh Institute of Democracy for the University of Virginia is on board. You can imagine that capacity we're going to have to accelerate the movement.
