SXSW Pitch: Collective Liberty
The Forrest Four-Cast: February 23, 2020
Of all the many horrors that persist in 2020, the fact that human trafficking continues is one of the hardest to accept.
One of 50 finalists for SXSW Pitch 2020, Collective Liberty has as its mission to eradicate human trafficking. They collaborate across industries, agencies, and survivor-support agencies to create groundbreaking, data-driven approaches that work. By leveraging high-tech data collection and analysis solutions, they shift systems and improve public policy to ensure as a community we support survivors while stopping traffickers.
By working to disrupt the entrenched systems that enable modern day slavery, Collective Liberty encourages the existing human trafficking community and other stakeholders to think in new and innovative ways to put an end to all forms of trafficking.
Rochelle Keyhan, CEO of Collective Liberty and the 2018 Thomson Reuters Foundation Stop Slavery Hero, develops and executes the organization’s strategic direction. Her team analyzes national trends and best practices, creating comprehensive trainings and resources to help facilitate the effective and systemic eradication of trafficking in the United States.
Formerly the Director of Disruption Strategies, at Polaris, a department she designed to shift systems to disrupt trafficking while supporting and empowering (instead of arresting) survivors in the United States. In that capacity she created national strategies to disrupt human trafficking including supporting the passage of over two dozen state and local laws, training thousands of law enforcement and financial crimes investigators across the country, and guiding the creation of the largest, most comprehensive dataset on a specific type of trafficking in the nation. Her work has led to the IAFCI Cyber Crime Investigator of the Year, MassChallenge Diamond Award, Innovate4Good, NGEN Leader of the Year finalist, and a fellowship with Progressive Women Voices.
Collective Liberty is the 2019 winner of the Innovate4Good challenge for its data and high-tech driven solutions to stop human trafficking.
See the Collective Liberty pitch at SXSW in the category of Social & Culture Technology, 11 am to noon Saturday, March 14, before a live audience and a panel of expert judges.
Winners in each of the 10 categories will be announced at the Pitch Awards Ceremony, at 6:30 pm Sunday, March 15. SXSW attendees are also invited to Meet the Finalists from 10:30 am to 12:30 pm Monday, March 16. All SXSW Pitch events take place at the Hilton Austin Downtown.
Keyhan talked about what she’s learned from the startup experience, why she thinks humility is overrated, and how she believes that mountains can be moved.
What is your top goal for Collective Liberty for 2020?
Cementing our role as a leader in the field and becoming a known organization throughout the United States.
What has the Collective Liberty experience taught you about life?
The startup life at Collective Liberty has taught me a lot of things — but most pointedly it taught me that we as a society we close doors on people without realizing it. I’ve been in a number of tech startup focus groups and meetups since joining the community where people are exasperated at their inability to diversify the space. As a first generation immigrant and woman, I still struggle identifying as a “tech startup” even though we clearly are. The language we use to define communities and who fits in them, and the visibility of who and what meet those definitions, really shapes the impressions of the “in-group.” I’m hopeful that as the focus on social impact startups continues to rise, it will increase visibility and expand the scope of who fits in the community.
What do you think is the most overrated virtue?
Humility. Leading from a place of humility and curiosity is vital and necessary, but leading also means embracing your power and using it to do the most good. Humility is a virtue that women are most exalted for, and it’s the one most likely to keep women from embracing the depth of their capacity for impact and their power for change.
What’s your actual super power?
I see systems and their moving parts, including the logjams and bottlenecks. With that vision I can identify simple, powerful innovations to remedy entrenched bureaucracy, or systems too big to move or change.
What motto or quote do you live by?
You have been assigned this mountain to show others that it can be moved.
If you were offered the opportunity to colonize Mars (but with no guarantee that you would ever return to Earth), would you go?
No. I and my organization are dedicated to the permanent change of society here on Earth — investing in our collective future. We have a lot of improvements still to make in our current society and way of life before we can talk about colonizing other planets. Colonizing Mars would result in significant amounts of labor and sex trafficking — with the isolation of another planet free from our systems of accountability to empower that exploitation. Not to mention the myriad concerns if we arrived on Mars to find it already populated — and all of the ways we, under our current approach to fellow humans, we would likely do harm to the populations native to Mars.
Look for more interviews with other finalists in this space between now and the start of SXSW Pitch on Saturday, March 14. Visit this page to see all previous interviews in this series as well as a list of all finalists.
If you are an entrepreneur, check out the SXSW 2020 Startups Track, which runs March 13–17. This track brings together founders and funders and showcases exciting new companies, products, services, and business models across different verticals and industries.
Hugh Forrest serves as Chief Programming Officer at SXSW, the world’s most unique gathering of creative professionals. He also tries to write at least four paragraphs per day on Medium. These posts often cover tech-related trends; other times they focus on books, pop culture, sports and other current events.
