Find Your Voice. . . Break the Chain
An interview is featured on the Women of Vision Blog today with David Batstone, author of Not For Sale and founder of the Not For Sale Campaign where he tells Hannah Storm that slavery is a problem that persists in the United States today, largely due to human trafficking. (CBSNews.com)
Information:
David Batstone is a professor of Ethics at the University of San Francisco. He is the founder and president of Right Reality, an international social venture firm. Batstone has authored seven books, the two most recent being Not For Sale (HarperSF) and Saving the Corporate Soul (Jossey-Bass). He was a member of the founding team of Business 2.0 magazine and served six years as executive editor of Sojourners magazine and founder of the SojoMail ezine. He currently serves as a senior editor of Motto magazine. He has contributed articles to the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, Wired, and SPIN. He is the recipient of two national journalist awards and was named National Endowment for the Humanities Chair at the University of San Francisco for his work in technology and ethics. During the 1980s, Batstone founded a non-governmental agency dedicated to economic development and human rights in Latin America.
Magazine Article:
Finding Slavery in Your Own Backyard… and Deploying Solutions to Abolish It
Graduate Theological Union, Currents Magazine – September 2009"David Batstone ─ professor of ethics at San Francisco University, entrepreneur, author, and social activist ─ founded the nonprofit Not For Sale when he discovered human slavery in his own back yard, Berkeley, that is.
Batstone learned that Lakireddy Reddy, owner of Pasand restaurant, had kept cook- and wait staff as human slaves. Reddy confessed to felony charges, including conspiracy to commit immigration fraud and transporting a minor for sex, only after a tragic accident came to light: A roommate found two teenage sisters ─ Chanti and Lalitha Prattipati ─ unconscious in a Berkeley apartment also owned by Reddy. They were poisoned by carbon monoxide leaking from a blocked heating vent, and Chanti was pronounced dead at Alta Bates Hospital. An investigation revealed that Reddy and several family members used fake visas and false identities to traffic adults and children into the United States from India. In many cases Reddy secured visas under the guise that these were skilled technology professionals who would be placed in software companies. They ended up working as waiters, cooks, and dishwashers at Pasand or other businesses Reddy owned, forced to work long hours for minimal wages they returned to him as rent for one of his apartments. Reddy had threatened to turn them in to the authorities as illegal aliens if they tried to escape.
Shocked that his favorite restaurant had become a hub for a trafficking ring, Batstone realized that far from being a thing of the past, slavery likely crosses our path on a regular basis without our awareness. His research reveals there are more than 27 million slaves in the world today, more than at the height of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. A tool called Slavery Map: http://slaverymap.org on the Not For Sale website, http://www.notforsalecampaign.org/, allows users to see, post, and report where slavery exists today.
“The shoes I wear, the coffee I drink, the sugar I put in my coffee ─ may all be invisible links to slavery,” Batstone says. “Being free to choose our destiny is fundamental to how we see ourselves. That’s why human trafficking strikes a nerve, and people want to help.”
Indeed, in two years of operation, Not For Sale has 42 state operations; projects in Uganda, Peru, Thailand, Cambodia and Honduras; eight full time staff members; and countless volunteers, including some top sports and music celebrities. The organization’s success, Batstone says, lies in a method they call “Open Source Activism,” derived from the high tech industry. “We don’t write the rules. We give you tools to act locally and show you how your local action connects with global activism.”
Another Not For Sale tool is Free To Work, a wiki, where users publish and find information on whether products they use are linked to slavery. The International Human Rights Forum now downloads its data into Not For Sale’s wiki. In addition to the wiki, Not For Sale invites companies to be Free To Work companies. These companies pledge transparency and allow investigators trained at Not For Sale to examine their operations and ensure they are free from slavery.
Not For Sale’s success undoubtedly arises from Batstone’s experience as an investment banker working in underdeveloped nations. The nonprofit is part of a social venture Batstone cofounded called Right Reality, which also includes business consulting services and a company that builds and sells organic farming tools. “Right Reality is about helping nonprofits be financially viable, and companies be socially responsible,” he says.
The thread running through all of Batstone’s work? He calls it a passion for transformation, and credits his GTU education with nurturing it. He uses another Not For Sale initiative called Free To Play as an example. It started with Batstone’s kids’ basketball teams: If a kid scored a basket they gave ten cents to free kids somewhere else on the globe. Now, a pitcher for the San Francisco Giants and a left fielder for the St Louis Cardinals give to Not For Sale when they score home runs; an Oakland Raiders linebacker gives when he makes a tackle; an international skating champion gives each time he performs a triple toe loop.
The beauty is you don’t have to be a celebrity to participate, Batstone says. “The idea is you transform whatever your gifts are to give a gift to someone else, to free another person.”
Action Steps:
Tell-Tale Signs of possible human trafficking
If someone is controlled at all times and isolated
If they speak only Chinese, Korean or Spanish
If they can’t leave work place
Contact Health and Human Services at 1-888-373-7888
Go to http://www.notforsalecampaign.org/ and report your suspensions
Caution to Parents:
Be sure that your child is accompanied by adults
If your child goes to a sleep over or a party ask if there is adult supervision
Teach your children not to talk to strangers and how to be polite but draw a line if they are spoken to at a mall
Caution your child that if they run away they will be contacted by a trafficker within 24 hours
Oversee their Online accounts like myspace, facebook and make sure that they are private lines
Warn your child to never meet someone through online communication
Prayer Focus:
Pray that God would bless the efforts of the Not for Sale Campaign in the US to bring together law enforcement, religious agencies, and universities in communities to form a community engaged group against human traffickingn in local areas. Ask God to prompt chucrhes to join the Not For Sale underground church community to care for freed victims of trafficking in their local area by providing a safe haven with housing and medical and emotional aid. Ask God to work through local universities to map out the areas within the local cities where human trafficking is happening to assist local law enforcement agencies and churches to mobilize against the trafficking. Pray that parents in America would be more actively engaged in their parenting duties training their children on how to be safe from trafficking. Pray that God would bless the global efforts of the Not For Sale Campaign in Thailand, Cambodia, Uganda, Hondurus and Peru.
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