On March 26, Grace Farms held it third annual Design for Freedom Summit — a momentous day of action and awareness. Nearly 600 leading experts across sectors, who are working to eradicate forced and child labor from the built environment, attended the sold-out event.
Since holding the first summit in 2021, Grace Farms has welcomed over 1,000 people representing industry professionals and university students united in the fight against forced labor in the building materials supply chain. To date, the global movement, which was initiated and since accelerated by Sharon Prince, CEO and Founder of Grace Farms, has reached more than 25,000 experts and leaders around the world. Next year’s Design for Freedom Summit will be held on March 27, 2025. Below is Prince’s Welcome Address, only slightly edited for clarity. (Feature photo, Jacek Dolata)
“We are not just in agreement that forced labor in the building materials supply chain is unethical and immoral. We are in agreement that now is the time for action and true market transformation to design and build more humanely.”
Sharon Prince, CEO and Founder of Grace Farms, opens the Design for Freedom. Photo by Jacek Dolata
Today, we’ve come together for freedom, with the goal of using every bit that we have to create a more humane and equitable world. You have tremendous amount of influence, advocacy, purchasing power, and leadership right here in this room.
We’ve come together for freedom and with the goal of using every bit that we have to create a more humane and equitable world.
You hold the choice of whether we’re going to fuel fair labor or forced labor. Without inspection of our fraught, gargantuan building materials supply chain, particularly when driving costs lower and trying to meet our budgets and timelines, we are just accepting ‘the slavery discount.’ First food was called to be accountable for its supply chain. Then clothing. Today, shelter is being called into account right now. We have the power to reverse what is an entropic egregious human rights violation of over 28 million people in forced labor conditions, of which are over 21 million are in state-imposed and privately- imposed forced labor conditions, producing $63 billion worth of goods for us to consume. Our sisters and brothers would not be enslaved if we refused to touch that mammoth mount of tainted goods. Today we are going to hear some very human stories of those that endure these conditions and I hope that we can redouble our efforts to end this exploitation.
As a society, we have a moral and ethical obligation to end this human rights violation that subsidizes the bottom lines of all of our residential, commercial, government, and cultural projects around the world. To be clear, right now, projects generally favor accepting ‘the slavery discount’ versus verifying fair labor pricing for our raw and composite materials. Over the past decade, enslavement has actually escalated. It is jarring. Last week sadly, and as expected, the the International Labor Organization (ILO) released updated valuation of illegal profits in the private sector derived from modern slavery over all, including sex trafficking, at $236 billion dollars.
Chelsea Thatcher, Grace Farms’ Chief Strategy Officer and Founding Creative Director, announcing the With Every Fiber Exhibit opening on May 4th. With every fiber of our commitment, the Design for Freedom movement is aiming to eliminate forced labor from the building materials supply chain. Photo by Melani Lust
This grave cost is even more urgent to address in light of the warming planet, extreme weather, and climate change, as the impacts of these crises are felt disproportionately by the most vulnerable. Climate change is forcing mass migration as crops, water sources, and farming opportunities continue to diminish. As we note in the Design for Freedom Report, migration is one of the top key risk factors for modern slavery. Currently, prosecutions for the crime of forced labor remained very low, meaning the perpetrators are able to profit from their actions with impunity. And now construction, this is you, is the biggest offender of both modern slavery and global carbon emissions, both on the job site and beyond the perimeter of the job site in the supply chain. And at the same time, corporations are calling for decarbonization. Right now, it’s intensifying and the most common way to do that is through solar technology.
As a society, we have a moral and ethical obligation to end this human rights violation that subsidizes the bottom lines of all of our residential, commercial, government and cultural projects around the world.
However, solar panels are now the fourth highest at-risk product consumed by the G 20 with between 35 and 45% sourced in the Uyghur region of China. Now, instead of flipping our decisions on a dime when we find the cheapest suppliers, we need to make our decisions even faster when we see fair labor, bolstered by material circularity and reuse. We are proposing ethical decarbonization, a new term that recognizes the direct and inseparable relationship between the carbon in our building materials linked to climate change and the suffering of forced labor in extracting and manufacturing our building materials. We simply cannot create and subsidize environmentally sustainable solutions with forced labor and child labor. And the reality is we don’t have to. So we are getting after it. Let me share what we’ve been undertaking together over the past year, and I think you’re going to be amazed. This Design for Freedom Summit reflects years of voluntary commitment by so many of you, global experts and leaders. Our entire team at Grace Farms, just like all of you here today, are part of the Design for Freedom movement.
They make this happen and it does make a mammoth difference year over year since we formally launched in late 2020 in terms of expanding usage of the Design for Freedom Toolkit. And over 25,000 professionals have been alerted to Design for Freedom with over 130 presentations. And this morning we are publishing the Design for Freedom Ethical Supply Chain Workshop Insight Report that was co-hosted with heavyweights Turner and the State Department Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO), along with many of their largest manufacturers, including our lead sponsor today, ASSA ABLOY. They have 61,000 employees in 70 countries, and it really matters the work that you’re doing to support Design for Freedom.
Today we’re going to be announcing five new Design for Freedom Pilot Projects, issuing four completed Pilot Project Case Studies, and we still have three in the queue in India and New York, a dozen total. These Pilot Projects initialized over a three-year period have been instrumental in engaging full teams, grappling with how best to assess fair labor inputs and stimulating research and partnerships, including many of you that you’ll see here that are contributing to our With Every Fiber Exhibit. This is the avenue we’re taking to engage the public and stimulate awareness, demand, and ultimately action.
With Every Fiber Exhibit photo. This new long-term exhibit, which opens to the public on May 4th, is designed by Studio Cooke John, with Pentagram, and offers cross-sector insights into the scope of the problem and proposes strategies and practices to address it through a series of material studies, including timber, steel, concrete, and textiles. The Exhibit is curated by Chelsea Thatcher, Grace Farms’ Chief Strategy Officer and Founding Creative Director. Photo by Dean Kaufman
So now we also have a highly engaged selection of 75 students from 30 universities here today. You are the future of Design for Freedom movement and you’re going to be the key drivers. You have immediate agency to prioritize ethical supply chains on your first job because this is now a matter of legal compliance. Alan Ricks, who is a founder of MASS Design and on one of those projects, you brought to your class here from Yale just a few months ago. It directly relates to Design for Freedom and is titled Provenance and Possibility. Patricia Saldaña Natke, you’re here from the Illinois Institute of Technology and the University of Illinois at Urbana Champagne.
The participants in the Design for Freedom Summit during a lunch break in our Commons. Photo by Melani-Lust
And you bring your class every year. There’s a bunch of you came, flew in, and Patricia, you were the first to put Design for Freedom in the classroom. I appreciate that. And your commitment just accelerates. So this is how it happens. You fly out from Chicago every year. And also Nat Oppenheimer from Silman. There you are. You brought your class from Princeton, but you’re also the structural engineer of Grace Farms. So you can see how once you’re in, you’re in. And the Architecture College and Schools Association has selected Designed for Freedom for an architecture student competition commencing this fall. Michael Crosby is here with his University of Hartford class and Karen Kariuki on our team are running this substantial program that’s going to reach architecture students around the globe.
And then here with us today too from California is Sarah Billington, she’s the Chair, Civil and Environmental Engineering and lead at Stanford. And her dedicated Ph.D. student, Antonio, is here today too. They have begun a Design for Freedom research project on concrete. This has not been done before. It is really great. And they’re putting their intersectional brain power on this, not just from the engineering school but with others as well. So we’re going to be yielding results that I hope we can share next year. And because this is a business issue, we’ve engaged business schools. Now this is exciting too. Dartmouth just selected us to be one of their MBA programs. It started yesterday, which is fantastic. We have five students dedicated to it, which is really great.
Slavery does not reverse on its own. It does need intervention.
And then NYU and my alma mater, the University of Tulsa are also engaged. We have a whole swell of engagement from all of you students, which is incredible. But now we have to consider whether or not the global marketplace is not quite of your ilk. So what are we going to do? Slavery does not reverse on its own. It does need intervention. And the construction sector, the sheer weight of it is 13% of GDP can make an impact. It is time, I hope, for you too to get obsessed about materials. When I think of it, I think of the history of building materials and slavery quite often.
Concrete counts for 80% of all the materials in construction. The irony is that it has also lifted a lot of people out of poverty as well. So, there’s quite often this catch-22. Glass does not currently have a certification and is not yet audited for fair labor. Now I think of glass, I have an eye for it because we spent two years on this glass. Two years. We have over 200 panes of individually sized and curved panels. And yet I do not know what sand was used. I don’t know the materials that were used in glass. So there are plentiful, unintended third-order consequences from the 12 materials that we listed first in our [Design for Freedom] report. There’s a lot of challenges to how we move forward with these materials.
Left to right, Sharon Prince, Nasreen Sheikh, modern slavery survivor, author, and Founder of the Empowerment Collective Foundation, and Lisa Kristine, acclaimed human rights photographer and activist. Photo by Melani Lust
All said, corporations are becoming more accountable as well due to recently past government laws and regulations. We’re going to talk about that. And then Grace Farms from the very beginning was created based on this idea that space communicates. And what we know is that it can communicate transparency and freedom or exploitation. And the biggest opportunity we have now is to really eradicate modern slavery and the building material supply chain is to just keep moving forward as you are. And we do that with urgency. So now Lisa Kristine, acclaimed photographer, brave human rights activist, an exceptional human being. We’re going to share stories of those that are enslaved conditions around the world with love and dignity.
