Bringing the Human Evidence: HTF at UNGA Week 2026

In 2015, the world promised to end child labor by 2025. That deadline has passed. Nearly 138 million children are still in child labor, and 50 million people live in forced labor or forced marriage on any given day. Numbers this large are hard to hold in the mind. One face is not. So when our founder, Lisa Kristine, traveled to New York for UN General Assembly week, she brought the people behind those numbers with her: a young miner in Ghana, children working on Lake Volta, women standing in mercury-contaminated water.

In the Room

Lisa’s photographs were displayed at Aligning for Action: Transformative Partnerships to Combat Human Trafficking. It was convened by Justice & Care and the McCain Institute with the Global Commission on Modern Slavery & Human Trafficking, and hosted by Hogan Lovells Cadwalader.

Survivor leaders, prosecutors, policymakers and business leaders came together to ask how their different strengths could work as one. Speakers including Baroness Theresa May, survivor leader Nasreen Sheikh, Jessica Roberts of Justice & Care, and Amy O’Neill Richard of the McCain Institute kept returning to the same ideas: treat survivors as experts, keep the person at the center of justice, and build trust. As Jessica Roberts put it: “Partnerships work at the speed of trust.”

What We Bring

Near the end of the afternoon, a question went to the room: what is the thing that only you can bring?

For Human Thread Foundation, the answer is the human evidence. Lisa goes where most people never will and brings back what she has witnessed. We carry those images into the rooms where decisions on policy, prosecution, and supply chains are made, so the people in them are present even when they cannot be.

A photograph cannot prosecute a trafficker or write a law. But it can keep the person at the center of the work of those who can. That is our part. Survivors, prosecutors, governments, and businesses bring theirs. No one ends slavery alone.

What can you bring?