Who are you in 2025?
Authored by Fuzz Kitto
Be Slavery Free Co-Director
As I come into a new year, I am reflecting on who I am going to be in 2025. What is important to me? What are my values? How do I live with integrity? How do I integrate my values into my lifestyle and becoming the sort of person I want to be?
These thoughts were sparked by the death of Jimmy Carter – a person I hugely admired. At President Carter’s funeral his grandson shared;
“ I never perceived a difference between his public face and his private one. He was the same person no matter who he was with or where he was, and for me, that’s the definition of integrity. That honesty was matched by love. It was matched by faith.”
Rock legend and justice advocate Bono - from the rock band U2 - was presented with a US Presidential Freedom Award this month. In an article he wrote for The Atlantic, he muses on what freedom means to different groups, including his generation who believed humankind was evolving, moving inevitably toward being freer and more equal - despite 5 or 6 millennia of evidence to the contrary. He reflects that what he needed was what his friend Bill Gates would refer to as a “software update”, which is to say, a bigger brain.
He reflects that in America – the land of the free – we saw in the past election, as we have seen in Australia, that freedom is universally valued but not universally defined! Freedom priorities are focussed differently around the world. In Ukraine it is freedom from a Russian invasion, in the Sudan and Afghanistan it is freedom for females, in Palestine and Israel it is safety and peace, in Syria it is to rebuild after civil war. As Bono notes “Freedom is complex and demanding”.
However, in all these places and around the globe, the priorities of freedom that are not talked about are for those caught in modern slavery. Tricked, oppressed, contained and invisible, through greed and corruption, power, threats, abuse and violence, people’s freedom is being taken away. Last year we came up with the concept of tarpaulaning. Tarpaulins are used to cover things up, hold them down and make things hard to distinguish.
This is what we often see when it comes to slavery. In the supply chain of goods, lack of transparency and confusion due to lack of data, it’s as if a tarpaulin is covering it. We know it is there, but we can’t easily describe or define it. Our approach at Be Slavery Free is that:
there are things that we know, which we share,
there are things that we don’t know, but others do – so we introduce people and companies to these to share them, and
there are things that no one knows, and here we work to collaborate to innovate solutions
Our direct worker voice tool MillionMakers is collecting data like we have not seen before from the people with lived experience on the ground. Our Chocolate Scorecard is highlighting who needs to improve and who is leading in the chocolate industry. These tools, alongside the campaigns, help to remove the tarpoulining.
What holds us back from making bigger changes? Resources!
Join me in the question; who are you going to be in 2025? Are you going to be a person of integrity or a tarpauliner?
What can you do?
Get informed look at our website https://www.beslaveryfree.com and https://www.chocolatescorecard.com
Get involved in our campaigns and talk about what you get to know with people you know.
Support those of us who can do what you can’t do - https://www.beslaveryfree.com/donate