Kate Garbers
Kate Garbers (born 1981) is a founder and former managing director of the Bristol, UK-based anti-slavery organisation and charity Unseen. She has developed projects to support survivors of slavery, and assists and advises survivors. She also works with law enforcement agencies and governments on how to tackle trafficking, including contributing to the Modern Slavery Act 2015 and the National Referral Mechanism Review.
Quotes
[edit]"Interview with Kate Garbers, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Unseen" (2017)
[edit]- Unseen is an antislavery organisation and a non-governmental organisation and our mission is to work towards a world without slavery.
- When we talk about support we are talking about direct services to survivors. So we run a women’s safe-house, a men’s safe-house and also a resettlement service. The safe-houses are 24/7 and once people move out of there we then help resettle them in to the community, so we work with them for a bit longer as they are living in and around the South West.
- And we’re due to open a children’s project later this year so again a safe-house for children. Then we say by influencing we realise that as an agency on our own we can’t tackle this issue so we need to collaborate with law enforcement, with government, local and national, with the EU, with local authorities, with other statutory organisations, to make sure that we come together to look at which bits agencies should be doing to stop the issue from occurring in the first place.
- So, I think we appreciate that our support side is a bit of a sticking plaster, in that the issue has already occurred for people and you need to then kind of try and put people back together again and get them back to resilience, empowerment and independence. We do a very small part of that on their journey but ideally we want to work to a situation where we don’t have to have safe-houses anymore.
