STT Recovery Funding (360G-CR-4908634)

COVID19 -STT is requesting Covid-19 Emergency funding from Comic Relief in order to maintain our increased delivery of community campaigns. This is crucial in positively impacting vulnerable communities, including minority ethnic communities, and disrupting modern slavery and human trafficking (MSHT). Comic Relief is a valued partner of STT, having worked together from STT?s inception in 2005 to more recently granting our work with Syrian refugees in Greece and Turkey as part of Across Borders. We are so grateful for the support of Comic Relief in all that it has enabled STT to do. We now ask for additional funding to allow STT to continue to meet the need for our service, which we will detail in this application. Founded in 2006 to coincide with the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade, STOP THE TRAFFIK developed its intelligence-led approach to trafficking prevention in 2015. With support from IBM and Facebook, we were able to expand our reach, informing our focus at a local, national and global level. Our solutions are grounded in people, technology and collaboration, and we pride ourselves on our extensive range of partners, which include NGOs, businesses, governments and law enforcement. Through collaboration and sharing information with partners, we are building a global picture of MSHT. This global picture shows hotspots and trends of MSHT and allow us to extract meaningful insights that we then use to target our action, in order to prevent people being trafficked in communities around the world. MSHT is a global business that takes $150 billion in profit each year and affects over 40 million people worldwide. To sustain its business, MSHT needs to recruit a minimum of 8 million people a year to maintain its profitability and meet and increase the demand. STT understands that this errant economy can only be effectively disrupted by undermining these three business drivers. This is how we do that: * Recruitment ? STOP THE TRAFFIK uses digital platforms and social media to geo-target people and communities at risk, many of whom may be difficult to reach through traditional methods. Our campaigns raise awareness, share information, and change behaviour related to MSHT. * Money - STOP THE TRAFFIK works with banks and other financial services organisations to understand how MSHT transactions can be identified, defining typologies and specific indicators. * Demand ? Businesses demand cheap workforce, services and products, meaning they face MSHT risk in their operations, supply chains, and to their customers. STOP THE TRAFFIK provides businesses with intelligence-led support to manage and prevent these risks. Due to Covid-19, almost all our work with businesses was put on hold as their operations changed. This, and a decline in individual giving experienced by the sector, meant that our funding for this financial year is down 10% (approximately £60k). However, Covid-19 has not only affected our business clients and donors. Covid-19 has exacerbated the risk to people of, or in, exploitation. Our intelligence has confirmed this, providing additional key insights into the specific groups at increased risk of exploitation and how traffickers are evolving to take advantage of their vulnerabilities. Therefore, we have diverted our focus to the delivery of our community campaigns. These campaigns, which we plan, design and implement, are a vital response to an increased need for changes in awareness, knowledge and behaviour of people in or at risk of MSHT. We have not furloughed any staff or made any redundancies, rather diverted the focus of team members to work on campaigns. Still, our present team is now under extreme pressure to deliver an effective response to this urgent need. Ongoing STT community campaigns and trusted partnership work, combined with our growing incident database, is identifying targets for continuing our work. Intrinsic to the delivery of our community campaigns is the need for analysis, communication, MEL, partnership building and coordination. All of this is currently drawn from our team, which comes at a cost. In addition to this, by increasing our service delivery in response to Covid-19, there are increased costs related to their effective implementation and conclusion of this work. We are in a fragile funding environment, with uncertainty around previously guaranteed funding streams. The emergency fund from Comic Relief would enable STT to commit to the resilience required to increase our delivery. In addition to this, Covid-19 emergency funding from Comic Relief would also positively impact the wider community, including people of BAME origin, who our research has shown as being significantly more vulnerable to MSHT. Furthermore, our community campaigns also equip people who may know a vulnerable person in, or at risk, of exploitation with the information they need to signpost them to appropriate help and support.