The Collective Threads Initiative (CTI) is an initiative that mobilises tailored resources to communities worldwide, focusing on preventing exploitation and ensuring human dignity. CTI adopts a cross-movement approach, recognising that human trafficking and exploitation are interconnected with labour rights, gender justice, and climate change. Through a pan-African, queer, feminist lens, CTI emphasises lived experience leadership, dignified work, and equitable institutions to develop sustainable solutions.
CTI envisions a world where movements collaborate rather than operate in isolation, where funding directly reaches grassroots leaders, and where solutions are driven by those most affected. By fostering equitable partnerships, shifting harmful narratives, and ensuring long-term resourcing for impactful work, CTI aims to create new paradigms for ending exploitation.
We believe that by working with impacted communities as full partners, honouring their knowledge, and supporting their solutions, the impacts will be meaningful and sustainable.
The origins of the Collective Threads Initiative trace back to a collaboration between its two co-founders on the project “Meaningful Engagement of People with Lived Experience.” This project involved developing a framework and assessment for measuring and increasing lived experience leadership across various engagement spectrums. The framework was created collaboratively with a small team of impacted individuals and was quickly recognised as a model for non-tokenising, impact-measuring engagement.
In 2024, recognising an opportunity to create something new and impactful from the ground up in partnership with their communities, the co-founders Sophie and Chris began working on this new initiative. They were soon joined by a third partner, Elizabeth, and together their team of Weavers (who function as senior directors using a feminist co-leadership model) connected with other Co-Weavers from diverse backgrounds to co-create what CTI has become and continues to evolve into.
