In 2012 our co-founders HRH Princess Eugenie and Julia de Boinville travelled to Kolkata in India, where they met the late Aloka Mitra, a social activist who led programmes supporting vulnerable women and children in India for over 35 years.

Aloka (who sadly passed away in 2025) founded the Women’s Interlink Foundation, which rescues survivors of modern slavery. The organisation gives them a home and teaches them simple vocational skills to support the process of rebuilding their lives.

The next five years were spent learning more about labour exploitation and modern slavery in the UK and meeting with policy makers, law enforcement agencies, academics, NGOs, social workers, and survivors to find out what support would help. The Anti Slavery Collective was created in 2017 as a project to raise awareness of labour exploitation here in the UK and build more effective models of collaboration. In 2022 this small project was incorporated as a standalone charity and The Anti Slavery Collective hired our first member of staff.

The Anti Slavery Collective hosted our inaugural Force for Freedom gala in 2023. The generosity of so many supporters during the gala enabled the charity to refine our mission and programmes, build a new team, and scale up our operations. We are dedicated to building on this momentum, strengthening our impact, and ensuring that modern slavery remains on the agenda for change-makers around the world.