Arise at 10: Walking Alongside

Three trustees reflect on ten years of Arise Foundation, the power of local leadership and why prevention matters more than ever.

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Wendy Strauss, Sr Lynda Dearlove RSM MBE and Sr Deirdre Mullan RSM

Ten years ago, Arise Foundation began with an idea that ran against much of the conventional wisdom of international development. What if the people best placed to prevent exploitation were not those arriving with outside solutions, but those who were already there?

In communities where poverty, inequality and limited opportunity leave people vulnerable to trafficking, religious sisters and other frontline organisations had been quietly doing the work for years. They knew the families, understood the pressures and, crucially, were trusted. What many lacked was not commitment or knowledge, but the networks, resources and institutional support that could allow their work to endure.

Arise was created to stand alongside them. Rather than building a large operational charity, it set out to strengthen the organisations already closest to vulnerable communities, helping them develop the skills, connections and resilience needed to prevent exploitation before it happens. It was an approach based less on prescription than partnership, and less on control than trust.

A decade later, that founding instinct still shapes the organisation. Arise now works alongside organisations across India, Nigeria, Albania, the Philippines and beyond, supporting local leaders to strengthen safeguarding, governance, prevention programmes and community resilience. It has also brought frontline experience into national and international policy conversations, amplified local voices at the United Nations and celebrated exceptional leadership through initiatives including the Sisters’ Anti-Trafficking Awards.

As Arise marks its tenth anniversary, three of its trustees, Wendy Strauss, Sister Lynda Dearlove RSM MBE and Sister Deidre Mullen RSM have been looking back at how that journey began, what has changed and why they believe the organisation’s original philosophy remains so important.

For Sister Lynda, one of Arise’s founding trustees and founder of a frontline support service based in London, the story begins before the Foundation itself. Religious sisters, she says, were already preventing trafficking, supporting survivors, helping women rebuild their lives and working in communities where exploitation was an everyday reality. Yet many were doing so in isolation.

“The starting point was recognising that religious sisters were already doing extraordinary work,” she says. John Studzinski, Arise’s founder, saw both the effectiveness of that work and the missing piece. “What was missing wasn’t commitment. It was the opportunity for those sisters to connect with one another, learn together and build stronger networks.”

The early vision was deliberately modest. Arise would not arrive to replace what existed; it would strengthen it. Grants helped organisations continue their work, but the Foundation soon discovered that money alone could not create the kind of long-term resilience it wanted to see. Partners also needed help with project planning, safeguarding, grant writing and understanding how to measure impact.

That realisation gradually changed the nature of Arise itself. What began principally as a grant-making organisation developed into a model of accompaniment: walking alongside partners over time, strengthening governance, safeguarding, monitoring and evaluation, and helping organisations build the systems they needed to thrive independently.

“The aim was never to create dependence on Arise,” Sister Lynda says. “It was to build confidence, capability and resilience.”

For Wendy Strauss, now Vice Chair of the Board, the approach challenged a familiar assumption in international development: that expertise necessarily arrives from outside. Arise asked instead what might happen if those already leading change in their own communities were trusted and strengthened to do more.

It is a deceptively simple distinction, but one that has shaped the Foundation’s development. Rather than exporting solutions, Arise has invested in local leadership. Rather than directing programmes from a distance, it has supported organisations to devise responses to realities they understand intimately. Across its networks, partners are encouraged not only to strengthen their own work but to learn from one another.

Wendy has been struck by the reach that such a deliberately decentralised model can achieve. “There is often a belief that scale requires centralisation,” she says. Arise’s experience, she believes, suggests another possibility: that networks built on trust, shared purpose and local leadership can extend their influence without losing their connection to the communities they serve.

Sister Deidre’s introduction to Arise came from a different direction. As the international representative for the Sisters of Mercy, she attended the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in New York and, among the many events taking place around it, found herself at an Arise workshop. She already knew Sister Lynda was involved. That, she recalls, made her expect something more substantial than “words and good intentions”.

After the Commission, Sister Deidre was invited to speak at an Arise dinner in London, where she met Studzinski and others involved in shaping the Foundation. What stayed with her was the combination of scale and seriousness: a small, focused organisation surrounded by people with the connections and determination to act.

That emphasis on action is particularly important because, for Arise, prevention has never meant awareness alone. The conditions that make trafficking possible are often deeply embedded: poverty, corruption, limited education, poor employment opportunities and weak legislation. Preventing exploitation therefore means asking what makes a person vulnerable in the first place, and what must change for them to have genuine choices.

The answer varies from place to place. It can mean livelihoods and education, legal awareness and safeguarding, stronger community networks or better governance. Increasingly, Arise has also sought to connect what is learned on the ground with the people shaping policy. The principle, however, is that frontline organisations and survivors should be given the opportunity to speak for themselves rather than having distant institutions speak on their behalf.

The importance of strong local relationships became especially visible during the Covid-19 pandemic. As economic hardship deepened and vulnerability to trafficking increased, Arise’s partners were able to respond quickly because they were already embedded in their communities. Sisters distributed food, provided protective equipment, made soap and found practical ways to keep supporting families despite the risks they themselves faced.

For Arise, the experience was a powerful demonstration of something it had long believed: organisations rooted in communities can remain effective even when circumstances change dramatically. It also underlined the value of relationships built over years rather than around the lifespan of a single project.

Relationships, of course, do not remove difficulty. Sister Deidre describes trusteeship as both a privilege and a responsibility. Over ten years the board has had to navigate organisational change, difficult personnel decisions and periods of serious reflection about the Foundation’s future. There were, she says, moments of “soul-searching”, but the commitment to the mission held.

Her answer when asked what matters most in governance is immediate: “Trust and transparency.”

For Wendy, another tension is familiar to anyone involved in philanthropy. Funders understandably want evidence, metrics and accountability, yet some of the ingredients most likely to produce lasting change trust, relationships, community confidence and local leadership develop over years rather than neatly within reporting cycles. The challenge is to measure what can be measured without overlooking what matters simply because it is harder to count.

That tension goes to the heart of Arise’s values. Dignity, humility and trust, Wendy argues, are not abstract aspirations but practical disciplines. Dignity means seeing people as agents of their own futures. Humility means recognising that proximity can produce better judgement than distance. Trust requires sharing power and accepting that those closest to a problem may also be best equipped to respond to it.

The Sisters’ Anti-Trafficking Awards, delivered with the International Union of Superiors General and the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, are one expression of that belief. They recognise Catholic sisters whose leadership has transformed communities affected by trafficking and exploitation. For Sister Lynda, their significance goes beyond celebration: they show what effective practice looks like in different cultures, create role models and bring work that is often carried out quietly on the front line to the attention of funders and policymakers.

There is no suggestion among the three trustees that ten years of progress has made the problem less urgent. Modern slavery remains vast and adaptable, and the conditions that allow exploitation to flourish are stubborn. “The reality,” Sister Lynda says, “is that for every person rescued, another person may be trafficked.” Prevention therefore remains, in their view, the long game: reducing vulnerability before a crisis becomes visible.

Yet the reflections are not without optimism. Wendy believes there is a growing recognition that prevention deserves the same seriousness as intervention. Some of the most consequential work, she says, happens long before the moment at which exploitation attracts public attention.

Sister Deidre sees strength in Arise’s scale rather than despite it. “We’re small,” she says. “We’re focused. We’re well connected and respected.” Its work with religious sisters remains distinctive because, as she puts it, they do this work not simply as a job but as a vocation.

Perhaps that is why the phrase “walking alongside” feels so apt after ten years. Arise’s story is not one of a single organisation claiming it can end modern slavery. It is a story about what can happen when communities are trusted, local leaders are supported and organisations are given the confidence and connections to become stronger in their own right.

For a decade, that has been Arise’s contribution. As the Foundation enters its second decade, Sister Deidre returns to the belief that has carried it through difficult moments as well as successful ones. “The Arise Foundation has weathered the storms because, in the end, we believe another world is possible.”