Justin Dillon on His Efforts to End Human Trafficking

Hi Guideposts. My name is Justin Dillon; I’m the author of A Selfish Plan to Change the World and I’m the CEO of Made in a Free World.

I never thought I’d be solving problems for business and supply chains and slavery. I saw a magazine in the studio and the cover of the magazine said, “The New Slave Trade,” and as I read it, I was reading about how these labor brokers will go to remote parts of the world and trick girls into coming to do modeling jobs or some kind of manual labor jobs, tell their families to let the girls go and then end up throwing the girls into brothels.

I’d never heard of anything like this before, and as I was reading this, I just thought, My gosh, how can this be happening in the world? But it’s not really affecting me, so I’m going to move on.

A few months later, my band, [Tremolo], got the opportunity to be a part of this program where they take music and they put it in different parts of the world where bands don’t typically tour. So our band got to go to this remote part of Russia, and we played for the entire week, which meant that we weren’t moving around and we’d get to know the community and get to know the people that were a part of that.

As we would talk to the kids after the concerts, some of the girls would come up to us, telling me the exact same stories that I’d just read about in that article, about how labor brokers were coming in, offering them trick jobs.

So that was the moment for me where I said, “Gosh, this doesn’t seem right. Everybody should know about this; I want to push into this. I want to understand what this is. Is there something inside of me that I can offer to the world to be able to help with this?”

So when I came home, I bought two books on the issue of human trafficking, read them both, called both of the authors, which happened to be organizations, asked them how I could help, and they said, “Well, you can raise money for us.” We did; we put on concerts, we wrote songs.

But something inside of me wanted to do more; I wanted to take my community and actually bring something to this issue. So in 2008, I rallied all the musicians that I could and we got together and we made a movie called Call and Response and we released it to movie theatres around the world. It was one of the top documentaries of 2008, and it really was an incredible moment in the movement for freedom, to bring all of my community, everything that was inside of me and around me, and bring it into this issue.

What we were seeing is that slavery is a $150 billion industry. A hundred and fifty billion dollars in profits. That’s more than, like, Nike, Google, Starbucks, Facebook combined. Charity amounts to about $200 million a year, so that’s really not a fair fight. For us, we thought, Well, what if we could get the marketplace to really get around this—not just the consumers, but businesses. Can we all take our purchases and figure out how to prevent slavery from happening? Then we can get trillions of dollars to start working and prevent from happening.

And that’s what really helped start our next company, Made in a Free World. And I’d sent with business professionals—they all wanted to do something, they all wanted to participate in this, but they didn’t have the tools to do it. So for us, we felt like, what if we could make and provide a tool for business to use? When businesses buy from each other—that’s a supply chain—what if we gave them a tool to help them know how to buy better? And that’s when we decided to create [our software] FRDM. It’s a business tool that businesses use to help them buy better.

We help them map where slavery might be entering in their supply chain and then they can use their buying power to be able to choose the right suppliers or ask their suppliers if they know of any incidents of slavery. And today we’re helping businesses use more than $10 billion in purchasing to help make the world better, and that’s pretty cool.