 So good morning, everyone. Did you have a good conference yesterday? Yeah, fantastic. Fantastic. Without taking too much time, I would like to invite John from FreeSET, John Sinclair from FreeSET. John has been a great inspiration for me. He helps FreeSET based in Calcutta. He's going to talk about the story of FreeSET and how they have taken, it was my request actually to him to talk about how they have made certain decisions which are hard decisions but more sustainable decisions, all right? So I welcome John. Thanks a lot for coming. Marie? Many of you might be wondering why someone who's got nothing to do with software development is speaking at your conference. I'm not totally sure why either, but you were all given a bag when you checked in at the conference, when you registered. And some of you may have read, there's a little tag inside of that bag. And it says that the bag was made by FreeSET. That's the organization, the business that I work for. And so the bags that you have with you were made in Calcutta by women who have come out of the sex trade or by young women who have been employed so that they won't end up in the sex trade. I came to be involved with this business many years ago, quite by coincidence really. I heard about what they were doing. I thought it sounded like an interesting story and that I would like to make a documentary about it. My background is television. And so I came to Calcutta to make a documentary about something that was very interesting and came away inspired. It was more than interesting, it was inspiring. And it was life changing. And I went from observing this as a documentary maker to wanting to be a participant in what was going on. So that visit was eight years ago. And now I've quit my job in television and I work for the company. It was through this work with FreeSET that I was introduced to Nourish. About three or four years ago, I had the good fortune to be introduced to Nourish. And he helped us develop our website. I'd just like to say if you visit our website and there's any kooky coding going on, I don't blame Nourish, it's probably me breaking it for him. But I thank Nourish and the organizing committee for inviting me here to tell you a little bit more about what FreeSET's on about and why I believe that it's an important thing. I'd like to begin by telling you a few short stories. Priya was married at the age of 14. But unfortunately, she wasn't able to have any children. So her husband left her. The tragedy of this is that now she is unable to be married again. She is ashamed, she's shamed her family. She herself feels shame and no one else wishes to marry her. Her parents won't take her back because of the shame. What is she to do? She meets a man who treats her well, who seems nice. And so she spends time with him. Until one day she finds that he sold her to the sex trade. Or Saraswati from a poor rural village north of Calcutta in an area called Mashidabad. Her parents are so desperately poor that they prepared to sell their daughter to a madam for an upfront lump sum and then the prospect of ongoing payments from their daughter from her proceeds of her work in a brothel. This woman to this day, some 30 years later still sends money back to her parents. Or Rita. Rita was a child of 13 in the 1970s when the Bangladesh War of Independence was raging. She was living in a refugee camp on the border with India with her parents. It was a terrible place for a 13 year old to live. It was, the conditions weren't very good. It was no fun at all. And so she was looking, as 13 year olds do, for something a way out. And she was befriended by a woman who was a little older and they got on really well. And she was appreciative of the friendship. So one day when this woman said to her, why don't we run away to Calcutta and get a job as a housemaid? You know, there was a sense of adventure and possibility and getting out of this horrible place that she was. So at the tender age of 13, she made the quite momentous choice to run away from her family and come to India. The problem was that when she got to Calcutta and she saw all these big buildings and it was impressed by this whole new place that she'd never seen before. She was from a rural area. There was no job as a housemaid. And her friend sold her to a madam. The first time or the time when her life changed was when she was taken to a room locked inside with a man. Given the soft drink, laced with drugs and raped, she was 13. This one moment, this one moment would change her life irreversibly forever. 35 years later, she still lives in the shadow of that moment. You'd think maybe she would run away and go back to her family. And I'm sure that that crossed her mind. But the thing about madams and pimps is that they control people with fear. She would have been told, you can't go back to your family. The shame will be too great. They won't have you back. You can't go away. They would have threatened her with violence. They would threaten to abuse her emotionally and that's how people get trapped. The point of these stories are that once a woman is in the trade, she's trapped. Sometimes quite literally locked up or kept in a state of fear through the intimidation. The shame of the life that has been forced on them and their rejection as outcasts by society leaves these women with few of any choices. It's not uncommon to hear these women say, my life is already ruined. I might as well continue working here while I can and some money. The problem with this is that they don't usually get to hang on to the money. They've got people hanging off them. They've often got a babu, a man who lives off the proceeds of their earnings and he often doesn't work and he often drinks and so he will drink away their income. And of course they face huge risks to their health and to their emotional well-being. So that's where free-set comes in. Oh, that's me, I guess, that's scary. That's where free-set comes in, offering dignity and empowerment through business. Restoring women to a place where they can make their own choices in life and experience freedom. And I'd like you to flip me back to the video that I'm gonna play here. I'm not a very good person. I'm not a very good person. I'm not very good at it. I'm not very good at it. I have a lot of problems in my life. I have a lot of problems at home. I have a lot of problems at home. I'm a good person. The reality of starting a business here is not about having a great idea. It's about getting to know your community and understanding who's here. This community is about women trapped in the sex trade. And if that's the job, the trade they are in now, then what can they do that will actually get in the terms of just selling the books? Free-set hires women based on the desire for freedom from the sex trade, regardless of the skills they have. They're given training for their job, as well as being made aware of basic health issues. They're also taught simple reading, writing and counting skills. It is just the first step on a woman's journey to freedom. Now she is free. She must learn how to be free through the baggage of her past. Debt, disease, addictions and a lack of self-confidence are common public time to work through. Free-set provides a supportive community. If a woman suddenly finds great conspiracy, it means she can earn a livable income from a job with a deputy. If she has small children, they can be cared for free-sets in house nursery. For many, working a free-set means they can afford small but significant improvements, like electricity for a light and fan. Free-set works actively for empowerment with life skills that they can use both at work and in the wider community. As they gain skills and confidence, they're given edit. For some, this means un-involves a position of leadership, or perhaps willing to use a computer. The women are broadly involved in the life of the business and participate actively in decision-making, such as the hiring of staff. The women are also involved in the life of the business and the working of the staff. We're involved in a business that counts, that actually changes lives as opposed to just making money. There's nothing else like it. It's the most amazing thing in the world. The great thing about the free-set story is that you can be a part of it. When you buy a free-set bag or a free-set tea, your money is directly contributing to women's freedom. It's not charity, it has dignity, and it puts food in their stomachs. You don't have to worry about having a free-set bag or a free-set tea. Your money is directly contributing to women's freedom. It's not charity, it has dignity, and it puts food in their stomachs. You join them on their journey. My place of work is these bags that you have with you. The business was started last year. We celebrated our 10th birthday. We must be doing something right. We've survived 10 years. It was started by a couple from New Zealand, Kerry and Annie Hilton. CV includes Vilda and Chocolate Salesman. His wife, Annie, is a physiotherapist by trade. They worked in Calcutta because they wanted to work with the poor. They wanted to do something to make the world a better place, to improve the life of the poor. They figured there were a lot of poor people in Calcutta, which is not an unfair assumption. When they arrived, they managed to find themselves an apartment right next to Sonogachi, which is the largest and oldest red light district in Calcutta. After the apartment, they had no idea. It wasn't until Kerry went out for a walk on their first night there that he came back to Annie and said, honey, I have something to tell you. Our neighborhood is a red light district. They had four children at that stage, aged between four and 12. So it was probably a little bit of a shock. But it didn't take them very long to figure out that these were going to be the poor people that they worked with. You see, poverty and prostitution are closely linked. Poverty in its ongoing effects traps people into a vortex that is hard to escape from. Many just don't have the resources and opportunity to move up the ladder. It's an environment, it creates an environment which leaves girls in a vulnerable position, whether it be desperate parents who would sell them off and sacrifice them so the rest of the family can eat, or because they're more easily lured away the prospects of a better life somewhere else. Having established that they were going to work with this community in the red light area and the women there, the Hildons had to ask themselves two distinct questions. They knew that they wanted to do something in business because they felt that would be sustainable, but they had to ask two important questions. One, what can they sell? Because if you can't sell your stuff, you haven't got a business. And number two, feasibly, what could the women make? Now, I guess, both difficult questions to answer. They could do a bit of research into what would sell, but knowing what the women could make was a bit harder to understand. And when they proposed making bags, to be fair, the women themselves weren't convinced they would necessarily be able to learn. Many of them were a bit older and middle aged and they said, are you serious? You want to learn so bags? But they were keen to give it a try. They were prepared to try and learn, but they weren't sure whether they were going to have the chops. So, what is free-sets business? What is it that we do? We are a business. We are a registered, for-profit, private, limited company. We're a social business. We're not a charity, we're not an NGO. We're often mistaken for a charity, an NGO, but we aren't. We're not there to offer freedom through business, making bags and t-shirts. Largely for the export market, although I'm pleased to say we're making some small inroads into the Indian market. This conference will be one example of that, but we've in recent years managed to sell a little bit more here. We often describe free-sets as an upside down business. The business exists not to make lots of money for the owner or the people at the top. The business exists on the ground. It exists for the women who sow the bags. We are here to maximise what we can pay these women. We want to be able to pay them a liveable wage where they're not just scraping by, just having enough to put food on the table. We want them to be able to have a better life than that. We take our staff from amongst those that no one else will employ. The outcast women of the sex trade are usually relatively uneducated. You can imagine if you've been sold into the sex trade at the age of 12, 13, 14, this does not improve your chances of getting a good education. It also means that for some of them their ability to learn has been impaired, so it's harder to teach them new things. They're emotionally damaged. They're in poor health. Are you seeing why we're saying it's not an easy option? We start off with all these things that you wouldn't normally layer on yourself when you're starting a business. But we exist precisely for these women so that they do have a choice, so that there is something that they can choose. Like I said in the video, no one will employ them. No one wants to know about them. They're outcasts, and so we want to offer them a choice where you can choose something else. The other thing that's exciting is that we are no longer the only business in our area that's doing this. There is another business that is offering the same choice, and that excites us greatly. We also employ girls who are at high risk of entering the sex trade. So they may not have been in the trade, but it's likely that their mother is a sex worker. And so we will employ them. One of the women who is in the video who earned the money to get married, she grew up in the area. Her mother was in the trade. She often had to go out and play in the road outside because her mum had a customer inside. When she started at Freeset she was I think around about 16 and she was still meant to be going to school. And she came and asked for a job and Kerry said to her, you can't have a job because you can't go to school. So she said, oh, okay. She said, well, I'll make a deal with you. If you go to school in the mornings when you're meant to, you can come to work in the afternoons. So she came to work in the afternoons and didn't go to school in the mornings. Her ability to learn was also impaired because even though she was going to school, she couldn't study. She couldn't stay in her room and when the customers weren't there she had to go and help her mum and she theoretically had access to education there, it wasn't working for her. So she came and worked at Freeset and as you can see, she loves working there now and she's a really smart woman and she's one of our emerging leaders, so it's exciting. At the end of the day we are here to help women embrace freedom and we have to help facilitate them to be able to embrace that because it's not just about economics it's not just about a job that's a starting point, but there's a whole lot more to it than here's a paycheck off you go, you're all in good shape now. Business should be about people exchanging their time, their talents, their skills and ideas in order to derive an income. This is trade for people. Human trafficking and the sex trade prostitution perverts this is the trade of people rather than trade for people. You see prostitution is a business too and I guess we see ourselves as being in competition with the local business. The problem with prostitution is that it locks women into a system that denies the many of the things and advantages that we take for granted such as education. In our community women are now treated as commodities and we don't think that it's right for human beings to be traded like commodities. As I said before in the beginning of the business no one was exactly sure whether or not the women could actually make the bags. When they got started there were plenty of mistakes. They would sew bags inside out and sew them upside down and sew the handles in the wrong place sometimes the bags were almost unrecognizable from what they were meant to be. I'm pleased to say as you can see at least as we get it right the handles are in the right place but it's been a long road getting to a point where they can do that. When they started we started with 20, 10 years ago there were 20 women and I think at the beginning if they sewed 20 bags in a day they were doing well. As Kerry would say to them we don't have a business if we only make 20 bags a day we've got to do better than this. I don't expect you to sew more than what you can but I do expect you to sew to the best that you can. I expect you to work to the best that you can. If you can sew one bag a day then I want you to try for two. If you can sew five bags a day I want you to try for six. If you can sew 10 bags a day I want you to try for 12. If you can sew 20 I want you to try more. We have to acknowledge that they don't all have the same abilities but we do want them to do their best. When we got started as well one of the big challenges was trust. You can imagine that a couple of New Zealanders landing in the middle of a red light district in Calcutta they were a little bit out of place they were still learning the language they didn't understand lots of things and to bring together a group of 20 women who they didn't know was quite a challenging task and they met someone in the community who was able to facilitate this and by people before they had many NGOs come through or charities people with good intentions who had come, who had made promises who had taken photos who had talked a lot and then they left and so this woman quite rightly asked why should we trust you why should we put our faith in you why should we get our hopes up that you are actually going to make a difference in our lives and that you will stick around in the community whenever you like the reasons why FreeCed is a business is precisely because in this context the charity NGO model doesn't really work there's no it's much harder to guarantee the ability to stick around if your funding dries up if the people who give you money stop giving money or someone says sorry we're not giving any more you're done, that's the end of the project and that leaves people that you set out to help high and dry and not necessarily worse off but possibly because they've taken steps to change and you also of course have raised expectations which are then dashed and so they lose hope so with that in mind business seems like a good option now of course business isn't a magic bullet either business has failed global economic crises come but at least with the business you have the capacity to adapt you can change what you're doing but you can adjust your products you can adjust your margins you are participating in a dynamic environment and you have a say in how you play the game you're not dependent entirely on someone else making an arbitrary decision and so that makes business a better option we are constantly developing new products and trying to convince people to buy them with reasonable success thankfully but essentially the trade of marketable products is what makes it sustainable and not charity now as I alluded to before it's very difficult employing women with two skills they come to us with nothing in fact they come to us with problems they don't just come to us as a an empty waiting to be trained so we have to work hard at giving them a training like we mentioned in the video get some literacy we help them with counting and so we have to work hard at all those things poor health is a major problem many of these women have serious health issues they have some of them have HIV some of them have hepatitis some of them have TB and these obviously affect their ability to work so we have to work through that one of the benefits for the women of working at Freestead is that they have government health insurance ESI it's you can't underestimate how much of a help that is for these people I had a friend who was in a car accident he broke his leg seriously it required an operation which costs 50,000 rupees now that's well over a year's earnings for most of these people more covered by insurance no problem not covered by insurance big problem and that's how people get into debt and get themselves into much more strife we seek to keep the women we don't seek to keep the women we encourage the women to stay where they are in their community because we want to transform the area that we're at we want them to stay where they are because when they come home from work at the end of the day they're an advertisement that life can change they say to their peers who are still in the trade your life can be different things can be different there is hope now for me the thing that excites me about Freeset is that exactly that it's about hope it's about saying there is hope for these women that their lives can change that something can be different but more than that for us as people who are outside of that situation there is hope that we can make a difference in the world there's hope that we can do things that meaningfully change other people's lives so often we hear about all the bad things in life all the bad things that happen in the world and it's depressing and often times people want to tune those out these days and I understand that because if you can't do anything about it well I know about it it just makes you feel guilty Freeset is exciting because you can do something about it you can participate whether it's buying Freeset products or telling other people about Freeset there are so many different ways that you can participate that's exciting yes that's why I'm still working at Freeset that's what I do is Freeset a perfect solution to the problem no, of course it's not does it transform lives for the better absolutely yes absolutely yes there's always room for improvement and nothing is ever perfect but it doesn't mean that it's not useful that it's not helpful and that it's not good reading you something that one of the women said describing Freeset before coming to Freeset I had a very hard life I had nobody to take care of me and I was always answerable to a madam for everything now I am a free person in my old life I had no connection with regular people but now I can freely talk with anyone I want if I need to ask for something from someone on the road I now have no hesitation of approaching them I didn't have courage like that before I can talk about my life after coming to Freeset I've never looked back at my previous life changes people's lives she's found dignity, she's found self-respect she's finding freedom and that is why Freeset is in business for freedom do we have time for some questions today? if you'd like to ask any questions I've had to skip over lots of stuff if you've got any questions feel free to ask we're talking about when easy is not an option I'm quite happy for you to have easy questions someone at the back really amazing to listen to your presentation and see the work that you're doing I think the problem retirement do you also do anything for that that's a very good question another benefit that I didn't mention that they have is called PF Provident Fund so it's kind of like a retirement saving scheme and when they finish work they get a payout which if they've worked for a long time can add up to quite a lot we don't have an entirely ideal answer to that about the best that we can offer is that you employ somebody else in the family so there's all income coming in we've had one or two women who if you like retired at the top end and there's another couple who are getting nearer that time when they're finding difficulty walking up the stairs and we'll have to investigate what we do about that but at the moment employing somebody else in the family is about the best way we can help with that given that you've been trying to help the women out you must also have felt some local forces trying to prevent you from doing that as some of them used to do often I'll be honest, I've been surprised at how little resistance we've had it's not like there's been no trouble over the years we've had some neighbors that like to cause trouble we've actually purchased buildings in the area so that we're less prone to the whole landlord decides they don't like you kick you out kind of scenario and with 200 staff, 150 women from the trade we need a lot of space so we've got a little bit of security in the fact that we have our own property say some of our neighbors have sent the police around a lot and we've been a little bit harassed in terms of people from the sex community we actually have a surprisingly good relationship with them we've had madams actually bring women to us saying this woman wants to come into the trade we think it's a terrible idea can you take her on and employ her now who would have thought that would happen but it's actually happened we have a mixed relationship we only employ 150 women there is 10,000 women in that red light district give or take there's more than 20,000 men going through a day we are only making a tiny dent and we tend to end up employing some of the older women so they're kind of past the peak of their earning days the new girls have it been in there we don't employ anyone who's really at the prime of their earning we would desperately love to be able to get some of them to leave and come but generally we don't and I think if we started making inroads there then people would start getting much more upset so we're kind of on the fringes of what's going to upset people yes that's a good question too lots because our business is very community based in terms of being in the community but also being a community that is free-set one of the wonderful things about being part of free-set is how the support systems work and the women support each other we've had some terrible tragedies in the last year some people who have died and seeing how everyone rallies around and supports each other has been wonderful you know when we started at 20 the community thing was really strong because we were only 20 it's easy to know everyone know what's going on but at 150 200 people can sort of start to get a little bit more lost and one of the big challenges for us is finding ways to maintain that sense of community to make sure that someone is looking out for everyone there's no one that's being overlooked and we haven't totally got enough of that I guess going forward we want to set up more businesses rather than necessarily continuing to make a big massive one can get a bit unwieldy but then finding ways I guess of leveraging the presence that we have is free-set being known as that so perhaps taking it as more of a brand rather than it being specifically one business we have dreams of, I mentioned Masheedabad earlier on in my talk as an area north of Calcutta about a quarter to a third of the women who work at free-set come from that region which got us thinking what's going on there there's a lot of women coming from there it's an area known for families selling their daughters knowingly into the sex trade and so what we are trying to do at the moment is work towards establishing businesses actually in that region if you like going from the bottom of the cliff which is where free-set is to the top of the cliff and trying to provide some economic opportunities so that they don't end up being trafficked in the first place and for us we can't do that ourselves so we are actually one of our exciting women and actually we want to set up a training organisation for people who want to set up these businesses and say hey, we've been doing this for ten years, we don't know everything but we've learned a lot and we want to help facilitate you to start businesses in this area we've realised the addition is a bit slow we want to go for multiplication instead and try to create more businesses One of the challenges in starting social businesses in terms of getting that initial funding can you talk a little bit more about how you went about it in this particular case there was an organisation in New Zealand that put up the money to use a phrase that's very common in New Zealand we started on the smell of an oily rag which means not much money I think they started with something like 5000 New Zealand dollars so it didn't take a lot of start-up capital they started small and in some ways one of the strengths of starting like that is you have to be innovative in how you do things I think it's possible to have too much money and it makes things too easy and then you're not as smart about things as you should be and so we've grown from there people donate money towards what we're doing people say what can we do to help and my first answer is you can buy our bags and buy our t-shirts but people still want to give money now obviously you can't give money to the business but it's a charitable trust that runs alongside that and when people have donated money I sometimes see it as it's kind of like donated capital it's kind of like shareholders in a business but they have no expectation of a financial return their money doesn't get used to pay the woman the business pays for the women but it also is used for helping fund schooling for some of the kids and the families of the women and we've got a thing called mukti budgeting which is a budgeting service to help this is a hugely important thing because so many of the women are in debt and owe money to money lenders who are charging them 10% interest per month so that's a service which sometimes will actually take over their loans so we will pay back the person that they've got the loan from and take the loan on and then we'll help them pay it back to that service at interest free so that they can actually get out of debt we've even had examples of money lenders being shamed into forgiving the interest and just taking the principal back that's pretty cool where can we see and buy these products if at all we want to where can you see them see them at freesetglobal.com that we saw anywhere else do you have something put up here so that we can buy some of the bags that you're carrying I don't have any with me I bought another bag with me sort of our new 2012 range we've just got the cotton canvas this is a sales pitch cotton canvas we've got satchel bags we've got some really cool half round bags for women they're not on the website yet we need to update the website we need to update the website so the rest is sitting down so the new catalogue will be available shortly but we have our products on the website if you want to buy them you can inquire we don't currently have an easy way of buying within India but I must say since I've been talking to people here I'm thinking we should probably look seriously at some capabilities for local sales e-commerce and also 80% of our businesses custom bags is doing it's doing these things so if you want bags for your business come and see me later time to hand over thank you John that was awesome I think he deserves a standing ovation please