Introduction
BSR’s Tech Against Trafficking (TAT) initiative partnered with Survivor Alliance to design and pilot a Lived Experience Consultation Group for technology companies working to prevent and address trafficking. The pilot was proposed and funded by Meta as part of its ongoing efforts to integrate affected stakeholder perspectives into its safety work, and was developed collaboratively with other TAT member companies. Through a structured, trauma-informed stakeholder engagement process, participating companies worked with lived experience experts for practical input on anti-trafficking policies, processes, products, and systems. The pilot helped companies pressure-test assumptions, strengthen real-world applicability of their approaches, and create paid professional advisory opportunities for consultants with lived experience.
Background
Technology-facilitated trafficking risks are complex and constantly evolving, as traffickers adapt their tactics to new platforms, tools, and AI. Consequently, technology companies face growing expectations to identify and address trafficking risks across their products, services, and business relationships.
The anti-trafficking field has increasingly recognized the importance of lived experience expertise—knowledge and skills informed by direct experience of trafficking—in shaping efforts to address human trafficking.
For companies, one challenge is ensuring that anti-trafficking policies and processes reflect how exploitation occurs in real-world contexts. Through stakeholder engagement, a key component of human rights due diligence, subject matter experts with lived experience can help identify where risks may arise, how safeguards work in practice, and how prevention and response mechanisms can be strengthened.
The Challenge
Several companies participating in Tech Against Trafficking (TAT), a BSR collaborative initiative bringing technology companies together to prevent and address human trafficking, sought to integrate lived experience expertise into their anti-trafficking work. However, practical barriers often stood in the way, including limited capacity to build and sustain relationships; uncertainty about trauma-informed and non-extractive engagement; and procurement, contracting, and payment challenges.
For lived experience experts, poorly designed company engagement can be extractive, tokenistic, or potentially retraumatizing. Meaningful consultation requires treating consultants as professionals: matching them to opportunities based on relevant expertise, providing clear scopes of work, compensating them fairly, and creating conditions for safe participation.
TAT and its members saw an opportunity to test a more structured, collaborative model—one that would give companies access to relevant expertise while creating paid professional advisory opportunities for lived experience consultants.
BSR’s Response
To address these barriers, TAT partnered with Survivor Alliance, a nonprofit organization uniting and empowering survivors of human trafficking, to create a first-of-its-kind Lived Experience Consultation Group pilot. Drawing on BSR’s five-step approach to stakeholder engagement and in close collaboration with participating TAT members, TAT and Survivor Alliance designed the pilot as a replicable mechanism for companies to engage lived experience subject matter experts as consultants in a trauma-informed, ethical, and focused way. The pilot consisted of five stages:
1. Define the purpose of engagement.
The process began with a listening session to clarify why participating companies wanted to engage lived experience experts and where their input could add the most value. This helped identify priority use cases and the expertise required. As a result, the consultation process was designed around the specific needs of online safety and human rights teams.
2. Identify and match relevant lived experience expertise.
Survivor Alliance drew on its network of 1,400 members to select four consultants, across four continents, based on their professional skills, subject matter expertise, geographic perspectives, and lived experience. This was a deliberate design choice: consultants were engaged as expert advisors, not solely because they had experienced trafficking.
3. Prepare companies and consultants for engagement.
To support safe and meaningful engagement, BSR and Survivor Alliance clarified roles, expectations, boundaries, principles for trauma-informed participation, and parameters for the consultation process. Two online training sessions prepared companies to engage with subject matter experts, while regular team meetings enabled consultants to share challenges and experiences.
4. Facilitate structured one-to-one consultations.
The core of the pilot was a series of one-to-one consultations between three participating technology companies and the consultants. These sessions gave companies an opportunity to test assumptions, brainstorm, and receive practical feedback on anti-trafficking policies, processes, products, and systems. For example, one company used the consultation to brainstorm the support resources it provides to potential victims of trafficking on its online platform, while another sought feedback on account takedown notices and appeals language for users. Fair compensation was built into the model to recognize consultants’ time, preparation, expertise, and participation.
5. Receive feedback and iterate.
Finally, the pilot was designed as a learning process. BSR, TAT, and Survivor Alliance gathered feedback on what worked, what could be strengthened, and how the model could be scaled or integrated into TAT’s broader work. These lessons, including guidance on appropriate compensation levels for consultants, will inform future iterations of the Lived Experience Consultation Group and support wider integration of lived experience expertise across TAT’s programs.
“Being part of the TAT Consultation Group has been a positive experience. I've valued the opportunity to share both lived and learned experience in a space where different perspectives are genuinely welcomed and listened to. It's encouraging to see organizations taking the time to engage with survivor voices in a meaningful way.”
—Rachel Ayangunna, TAT Lived Experience Consultation Group member
Results
The Lived Experience Consultation Group helped participating companies move from interest in lived experience engagement to practical application. The pilot had three key outcomes:
- For technology companies—Grounded and actionable decision-making: Participating companies received practical input on how anti-trafficking policies, product decisions, and user-facing processes may operate in real-world contexts. The consultations helped teams pressure-test assumptions and identify opportunities to strengthen existing approaches.
- For consultants—Influence over anti-trafficking policies and processes: The pilot created paid advisory opportunities that recognized lived experience expertise as professional knowledge, rather than limiting survivor contributions to sharing personal experiences. Consultants were able to gain valuable professional exposure by advising some of the world’s largest technology companies, contributing to how they understand and respond to trafficking-related risks.
- For multi-stakeholder collaborations—A tested model for future engagement: The pilot provided TAT with a practical model for embedding lived experience expertise into future workstreams. While modest in scale, it showed how multi-stakeholder initiatives, such as TAT, can enable companies to move beyond one-off consultation toward more ethical, structured, and impactful forms of engagement.
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“Thanks to the partnership between BSR's Tech Against Trafficking and the Survivor Alliance, we connected with knowledgeable consultants who shared valuable insights from their lived and learned experience. Survivor Alliance matched us with experts based on our team's objectives and areas of focus, helping support our platform's multi-stakeholder approach to helping combat human trafficking. We hope there are more opportunities for tech companies to help meaningfully connect with lived experience consultants to positively engage on an issue important to the industry, community of users, and society.”
—Daniela Guzmán, Community Policy, Research and Partnerships Manager, Airbnb
“It is an honor and privilege to fund and participate in the Tech Against Trafficking Lived Experience Consultation Group pilot. Listening to survivors is and has been central to how we improve our approach to addressing real-world experiences of trafficking and exploitation. We're proud to partner with TAT and Survivor Alliance and to extend that opportunity to our industry partners.”
—Antigone Davis, VP Global Head of Safety, Meta
Conclusion
Following the pilot, the Lived Experience Consultation Group will become a sustained part of TAT’s work, facilitating company learning through continued one-to-one engagement with member companies and supporting TAT’s programmatic workstreams.
While this engagement model was developed for the technology sector, it has broader relevance as companies across sectors face growing expectations to engage affected stakeholders across a range of business activities, including human rights due diligence, product design, platform safety, and AI governance. The pilot shows that when designed carefully, meaningful stakeholder engagement can help companies identify risks earlier, test assumptions, improve policies and systems, and make decisions that are better grounded in real-world experience.
For technology companies interested in the Consultation Group, TAT offers a practical pathway for engaging with lived experience subject matter experts. BSR’s Human Rights team works with companies across industries to design stakeholder engagement approaches that help teams build trusted relationships, strengthen risk management, and improve decision-making.
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