Freedom for Profit?

As anti-slavery nonprofits become more like businesses—in the ways they fundraise, partner, communicate, and govern themselves—does it diminish their ability to confront the structural drivers of exploitation?

Drawing on qualitative research conducted between 2016 and 2019, Stephanie Limoncelli’s Advocacy, Inc.: INGOs and the Business of “Modern Slavery” contends that adopting business-friendly strategies (and funding from corporate foundations) are blunting their advocacy power. Collaboration with corporations can mean being co-opted by their interests, she charges, diverting attention from more worker-centered approaches that might challenge the political and economic systems that allow exploitation to persist. That businesses often benefit from these collaborations is not, therefore, necessarily a good thing. It allows them to tell positive corporate- responsibility narratives without always delivering meaningful change for workers.

A sociology professor with a distinguished record of scholarship on trafficking and global governance, Limoncelli traces how business engagement has grown within the anti-trafficking and modern slavery field, interviewing 50 individuals across 40 organizations in nine Western countries, half based in the United States. (In addition to 29 INGOs, her sample included one business-led INGO, one survivor-led nonprofit, four intergovernmental organization (IGO) offices, three unions, and two academic centers.) The breadth of her analysis builds on other scholarship and—as such—is intended less to offer specific recommendations for practitioners than to frame a broader set of problems they must navigate. But, to the extent that the book has a normative underlying message, it is that actors in the modern slavery field must deliberately center workers and—rather than simply relying on market-based or corporate-led solutions—must ground their strategies in deeper political, economic, and social analysis.

This argument is persuasive, as far as it goes. As she documents increased organizational orientations toward business—and the emergence of dedicated private- sector partnership roles—the book serves as a salutary caution for the broader field. But how dominant actually is this model? To what extent does business displace other influences such as those of government or private actors?

Limoncelli’s analysis would benefit from greater clarity about the overall nature of the anti-slavery field, which she risks oversimplifying. As in most advocacy fields, some organizations in the anti-slavery space work within systems of power, including the corporate; many others name and shame, working to expose and disrupt or to build movements that tackle corporations head-on. Sometimes, different people in the same organization do both. A more explicit engagement with this type of diversity within the field—and with how different approaches interact, including within singular organizations that balance both approaches—would have strengthened the analysis and made it more useful to practitioners navigating these choices.

The book’s limited inclusion of worker- and survivor-led organizations diminishes its ability to fully examine the alternatives it champions. While Limoncelli argues persuasively that worker-centered and survivor-informed approaches are essential to effective change, she only included one survivor-led organization and three unions in her sample. This shortcoming likely results from the study focusing on Western organizations. As a result, Limoncelli disproportionately makes the case for worker and survivor inclusion in her own words, rather than creating space on the page for quotes from these constituencies.

The book serves as a valuable provocation that encourages reflection on the risks of corporate engagement while leaving room for a more nuanced understanding of how complementary strategies can drive lasting change.

Limoncelli’s first chapter (“Framing ‘Modern Slavery’ as a Business Enterprise”) is perhaps the book’s strongest, showing how framing exploitation as a form of criminal business directs attention toward individual perpetrators and away from labor rights, political economy, and systemic corporate accountability. The field has suffered long-standing tensions between approaches focused on raids, rescue, and prosecution (which target criminal individuals) and those emphasizing prevention, worker organizing, and policy reform, and Limoncelli’s message is important in this context.

To a certain extent, this message has already been part of the field’s evolution, both during and since the time of her interviews in 2016-19. Some funders—including Humanity United, Walk Free, and Laudes Foundation—as well as influential global anti-slavery NGOs already collaborate with labor and corporate-accountability groups in important ways. The Cotton Campaign (launched in 2007 to end state-imposed forced labor in Uzbek cotton) was an early example of an effort in which anti-slavery NGOs, labor-rights organizations, and unions all worked together to address forced labor. More recently, the emergence of legal corporate accountability and related frameworks in the European Union—such as the EU’s Forced Labor Regulation passed in December 2024 to prohibit the import or export of products made with forced labor—the United States, and elsewhere provides an opportunity for anti-slavery actors and peers, such as environmental nonprofits, to engage more effectively.

In the book’s second and third chapters—“Using ‘Good’ Business to Fight ‘Bad’ Business” and “Fraught Collaborations and Business-Friendly Strategies”—Limoncelli argues that engagement with business can weaken NGOs’ watchdog roles, reposition businesses themselves as primary stakeholders, and narrow the scope of acceptable advocacy. NGOs that provide advisory services may find themselves enabling corporate reputation management rather than driving accountability.

These chapters gesture toward a broad—and in some ways more complicated—structural challenge. Governments frequently issue policies and guidelines without building in the necessary enforcement, essentially requiring (or enabling) companies to self-monitor. NGOs are rarely resourced to act as the kind of independent watchdogs, at scale, that would be necessary. In cases where binding regulatory frameworks do exist, therefore, NGOs are much better positioned to push for meaningful compliance and accountability.

One of Limoncelli’s recurring themes is that NGOs insufficiently engage with political economy and state regulation. However much this critique applies to some actors, the book pays limited attention to organizations whose primary focus is labor-law reform, migration policy, trade enforcement, and corporate accountability (and to this extent, it overstates the market orientation of the field as a whole). It is certainly true, however, that companies spend an enormous amount on voluntary self-regulation schemes, which have limited impact at best (and are actively harmful at worst); the funding that flows to local organizations doing real accountability and watchdog work is a pittance by comparison.

However, since 2014, the Freedom Fund—the nonprofit where I work—has partnered with 288 frontline organizations, many of them community-rooted or survivor-led, including unions, and has collaborated with labor and anti-slavery organizations to advocate for regulatory reform and to initiate strategic litigation aimed at corporate accountability. As one of the largest collaborative funds in the modern slavery space, the Freedom Fund illustrates the kind of worker-centered, locally led, systems-focused approach the book calls for—yet does not appear in the analysis as a counterexample to the thesis that nonprofits are overly influenced by businesses.

The fourth chapter, “Technological ‘Fixes’ for Complex Problems,” presents some of the book’s most convincing evidence of the corporate sector’s influence on the anti-trafficking field. Technology-driven interventions—especially complex technologies like artificial intelligence—require specialized expertise, often developed within corporate systems rather than grassroots movements. In this domain, business logic is not simply ideological, it is often a practical necessity. An interesting follow-up would be to focus on worker-driven technology use, since such initiatives are less likely to be influenced by the corporate sector (and more likely to be context-specific and underfunded). For example, on a recent trip to Indonesia, a worker-centered group showed me how they printed a helpline phone number onto lighters to create a durable information-sharing tool.

In Chapter 5, “Communicating Like a Business,” Limoncelli treats cause marketing, founder-centric narratives, donor-hero framing, and survivor storytelling as evidence of the nonprofit adoption of business norms. I found this section less persuasive. A nonprofit that raises corporate money is likely to use marketing strategies that adopt the language and logic of that sector, at least when that nonprofit is speaking to individuals within that sector. But are these practices better understood as strategic decisions, driven by the nonprofits’ funding model, than by the overall influence of the corporate sector on the nonprofit? Nonprofits and the fundraisers they employ speak and behave differently depending on how they aim to raise money. A nonprofit funded by foundations, where staffers have a high level of expertise, is likely to focus on stories of system-level impact, while a nonprofit funded by wealthy individuals is more likely to articulate the ways one donor can make a specific impact. But how necessarily does this index ideological capture in the latter? Having raised funds for nonprofits for decades, I’d argue that the nonprofit sector and its marketing experts are influenced by best practices used in a wide range of domains, including the corporate sector but also for-profit and nonprofit media, human-centered design, social movements, and digital culture—and this is as it should be.

Advocacy, Inc. is an important piece of scholarship that raises essential questions about power, co-optation, and the limits of market-friendly reform. Limoncelli’s storytelling and use of testimonials are powerful, and her critique of business-centric advocacy and techno-solutionism is sharp and often illuminating. For practitioners, at the very least, the book serves as a valuable provocation, one that encourages reflection on the risks of corporate engagement while leaving room for a more nuanced understanding of how complementary strategies can, together, drive lasting change.