Free the Slaves’ Global Ambassador, Katie Ford is featured in the New York Daily News today. Ford is the former CEO of Ford Models—the prestigious agency was founded by her parents, and Katie helmed the company from 1995 to 2007. This article follows Ford’s journey from the scion of the modeling world, to the trenches of the anti-slavery movement.
via New York Daily News:
When Katie Ford was growing up, she had the world’s most famous models as housemates.
“They would raid our closets,” Ford says. “I remember Jerry Hall running from the dining table to meet a date. And Kim Basinger studying French in our bedroom.”
In order to shelter the young out-of-town beauties from playboys and other piranhas, her parents, Eileen and Jerry, founders of Ford Models, simply put them up in their home.
Katie did the same after her parents handed her the CEO torch in 1995.
Her life was Hepburnesque, (Audrey, not Katharine), steeped in the glamour of couturiers, magazine cover shoots, runway shows in Paris.
These days, it couldn’t be more different.
She’s fighting slavery. In Africa. In India. Haiti. Nepal. Even, New York City.
Ford could have kicked off her Jimmy Choos and hit the beach after selling the agency in 2007, but after hearing a talk at the UN in 2008, she felt compelled to act.
“There are 27 million people enslaved in the world,” the softspoken Ford says. “It’s infuriating. I believe we can end it.”
She speaks with the know-how of a businesswoman who increased revenue 400% at her company before its sale.
Ford, a mother of two, went on a rescue mission to Ghana this year with Free the Slaves, which learned that boys as young as 6 were taken from their parents and brought to fishing villages to do dangerous work in the ocean—for nothing.
