It started as a one-year project for a Free the Slaves Freedom Award fellowship winner. But it has turned into a must-read platform for Free the Slaves supporters and our colleagues in the abolition movement. Today, it is 5 years old.
The FTS blog is our platform for the latest news about how slavery affects communities globally, and what Free the Slaves and others are doing to build a slavery-free world. The blog now contains 741 posts in 19 different categories – everything from “Faith in Action” to “Become an Abolitionist” to “Research, Monitoring and Evaluation.” More than 195,000 readers have visited the blog to date – including you!
“The main reason why I started the blog is because I thought slavery is considered a hidden crime. It thrives when people are unable to act against it or unaware that it exists right under their noses,” FTS blog founder Anne Keehn explained in a 2010 video profile.
Anne first encountered slavery during a journalism internship in Israel, where she discovered slaves from Asia on Israeli farms. “The line between me and slavery is not as big as I thought,” Anne said. “I couldn’t not do something about it.”
The blog Anne started has helped shine a bright light. Its impact is amplified because the blog is also designed to be a home for videos, success stories and photos from the field that we also share on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
Anne has moved on from Free the Slaves, but the continuing success of the blog she started underscores that we’re still following the simple three-word mantra Anne brought to our communications team: “Spread the Word!”
