October 9, 2014 – The Clinton Global Initiative partners with the Polaris Project and creates a “global modern day slavery” database

(…) the Clinton Global Initiative partnered with the Polaris Project in 2009, to build an anti-trafficking approach, replicable worldwide. The Polaris Project operates the National Human Trafficking Resource Center (NHTRC) and runs the National Human Trafficking Hotline. Polaris is based out of D.C. and is funded in part by the Department of Health and Human Services. Together, they created a “Global Modern Day Slavery” database of organizations across the globe to monitor human trafficking, in 2014. They claim it is the most comprehensive database of modern-day slavery organizations ever compiled for the public, and as noted on the map above, there are 199 countries in this database.

They state “By enabling actors in the anti-human trafficking field to better locate, identify, and connect with each other, the tool will help connect victims of human trafficking and at-risk populations to the help they need.”

When they began this project in 2014, they had 200 organizations in the database. There are now 2936 organizations and hotlines working on human trafficking and forced labor. There are 26 in D.C. alone. If one has done any research on human trafficking, there is a lot of telling information to be garnered from this database. It’s definitely one heck of a network.

The Global Modern Day Slavery Directory has also partnered with Liberty Asia’s Freedom Collaborative, an online, password-protected platform for anti-trafficking “stakeholders” that offers a newsfeed updated by users, a global community of organizations and research, and programmatic and legal resources. USAID and UNDP are just two of Freedom Collaborative’s partners.

Liberty Asia also partnered with La Strada International and the Polaris Project in 2013 to launch an alliance of human trafficking hotlines around the world.  Google funded this effort with $3 million dollars after determining that most illegal groups were involved in human trafficking in some way. Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas, said that there wasn’t great coordination between all of the hotlines.

“If you call one hotline in one company, it generates data locally, but there is no way to correlate data with a hotline in another country,” said Cohen. “[So we thought]: can you integrate all these hotlines so it doesn’t matter which one you call? You need an integrated ecosystem to make the right response.”

KEY FACTS

• The Polaris Project is a member of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). Members are by invite only and donate a minimum of $15,000 annually.

• Catherine A. McLean is the Chairperson for the Board of Directors at Polaris. McLean was the senior advisor to the Hillary Clinton for President Campaign in 2008.

• Steve Rosenthal, on the Board of Directors, served as Associate Deputy Secretary of the US Department of Labor during the Clinton administration.

• It’s also important to remember that the Clinton Global Initiative was never formally set up correctly and is not a legal entity.
(Read more: Corey’s Digs, 4/11/2019)  (Archive)