Featured SustainChain Member: Design for Freedom by Grace Farms

Sharon Prince is the CEO and Founder of Grace Farms Foundation, which established the Design for Freedom movement dedicated to eliminating forced labor in building supply chains. Design for Freedom offers a comprehensive toolkit for architectural, engineering, and construction professionals to help implement ethical sourcing strategies into their own practices.

Tell us about your background and what led you to establish Grace Farms.
Grace Farms started with a mindset, not necessarily the traditional way one imagines creating a public space. In 2006, while I was president of the Icelandic technical outerwear brand, 66North, which I brought to the United States, an architect friend of mine told me that ‘space communicates.’ During this time, I took more than a dozen trips across the ethereal landscape of Iceland. I was left with a sense of awe and wonder over the expansive and natural landscapes. Nature is a gift and I believe we need to preserve and protect it.

One of the last large private parcels in New Canaan, CT was slated to be broken up into 10 large residential parcels, so how could we protect this land and its 10 diverse habitats? When considering what the land could be used for and how to make it available to all, we asked the question, ‘What could this space do over many generations for good and how could it inspire new outcomes?’ These are the questions behind Grace Farms.

Architecture, when activated, can play a significant role in creating a more just and equitable world, inspiring new outcomes. Grace Farms has become that entry point and generative platform to advance good in the world, to create a more humane future for all. We worked with SANAA to create a hopeful space where the architecture would become a part of the landscape. The River building offers 360-degree views of the landscape in the changing seasons and the architecture breaks down boundaries between nature, architecture, and people, stimulating new perspectives.

This design has been elemental and intentional to our interdisciplinary humanitarian mission, to pursue peace through our initiatives — nature, arts, justice, community, faith, and Design for Freedom. Through the place of Grace Farms, and our initiatives, we convene people across sectors to address pressing humanitarian issues. Our stake in the ground is to end modern slavery and gender-based violence, and to create more grace and peace in our local and global communities.

Within a short time, we have accomplished some ambitious goals including the launch of Design for Freedom movement, bringing together over 80 global leaders from the ecosystem of the built environment, including SustainChain, to begin to consider removing forced labor from the building materials supply chain.

What inspired you to launch Design for Freedom?
Several years ago, I had an opportunity to be on a jury with the AIA to evaluate projects around the world, including an extraordinary girls’ school. We were accessing the sustainability of the various buildings, but social sustainability was not prioritized. When I asked if the bricks used in the school’s construction were made without forced or child labor that question it was met with silence. Then I reached out to our Grace Farms design and construction team and other leaders and it was apparent that the entire construction industry has been given a labor transparency pass. Once you know, you can’t unknow it and there is a different level of responsibility once you know.

With Design for Freedom, we want to truncate the timeline that it takes to remove forced labor from the built environment. We don’t have decades to wait like it has taken for the green building movement to take hold. Although awareness of forced labor and environmental conservation has risen over the decades in various industries. It started with food, then clothing, but the building industry lags far behind. So next, I’m proposing shelter.

Construction is the largest industrialized sector in the world and yet the most fraught with forced labor. It is also the most disaggregated and the least modernized. We launched Design for Freedom to create a radical paradigm shift and have since galvanized more than 80 global leaders to address this global human rights gap in the building materials supply chain. We are in turn creating pragmatic institutional responses to this gap.

With Design for Freedom, we are connecting the dots, surfacing facts, and proposing strategies to hold leaders of the full ecosystem of the built environment accountable. We believe a more humane future is in our sights and that the industry is ripe for disruption, especially with new technologies and data sharing platforms.

Since launching this movement, we have reached significant milestones. We are sharing information with future generations of leaders through collaborations with colleges and universities. We have issued a ground-breaking report and dedicated website that include original analysis and data on forced labor. We also released the Design for Freedom Toolkit during the first-ever Design for Freedom Summit this year. This toolkit is a comprehensive resource for AEC professionals so they can implement ethical, forced labor-free material sourcing strategies into their building constructions, including interiors and landscape.

We have also launched five Design for Freedom Pilot Projects in the U.S., the U.K., and India. It’s very exciting because now we can put Design for Freedom practices into action. These projects are, or will be, open and accessible to the public and they included the 21st Serpentine Pavilion, Black Chapel by Theaster Gates (London), Shadow of a Face, a monument to Harriet Tubman (Newark, N.J.) by Nina Cooke John an Arts and Cultural Center with Serendipity Arts (New Delhi, India), the New Canaan Library and Temporal Shift by Alyson Shotz at Grace Farms (both in New Canaan, CT).

And of course, now our partnership with SustainChain that will advance our shared goals of advocating for and realizing sustainable and ethical supply chains that are free of forced labor.

What do you hope to accomplish through Grace Farms’ partnership with SustainChain?
We joined SustainChain to help accelerate our goal of eliminating forced labor in building materials supply chains. Design for Freedom directly addresses UN SDG 8.7 which aims to take immediate measures to eradicate forced labor, end modern slavery and human trafficking, and child labor. We recognize that this decade needs to be one of great change if we are to meet these SDG goals by 2030. The Action Hub within SustainChain provides a digital platform that supports the work of Design for Freedom while offering a space for collaboration among our larger community of multi-disciplinary partners and visionaries. We hope that the Action Hub connects global partners, expands the industry’s body of research, and enhances supply chain transparency all while accelerating the growth of the Design for Freedom Movement.

What do you think it takes to move to achieve the SDGs?
We must put ethical supply chains on the industry’s agenda on the same level as environmental sustainability. Then change will happen. There’s a misconception that sustainability is just about the ‘green movement.’ What the general public may not be aware of, and for that matter, the construction industry, is that social sustainability is intrinsically linked to environmental sustainability. Think about how solar panels are made. Polysilicon is the main material component of solar panels and China now provides the majority of the world’s polysilicon. Nearly half of the global polysilicon supply is mined in Xinjiang Province and then processed in factories staffed by Uyghur workers. There have been numerous reports citing the horrific forced labor conditions in this region, and countries are stepping up, including the U.S., to ban imports from silicon producer there. In August, 3 GW of solar panels were seized by U.S. Customs due to the enactment of the Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act (UFLPA) which disallows materials whole or in part from the Uyghur region from entry without verification of meeting fair labor standards.

We need to consider embodied suffering the way we think about embodied carbon. So, while the push for environmental sustainability rightly continues, we must expand the definition of sustainability to include social equity, thus social sustainability. We need to connect the two, move forward together, and consider who are making cheap materials as we accelerate innovation.

There is an inverse relationship between driving material costs lower and raising the risk of human cost, without ethical material inspection thereby weakening innovation and accelerating environmental degradation. R&D and production investments to develop new means and methods as well as products are abandoned due to the lack of commercial viability when prices are subsidized with forced labor. We are accepting the slavery discount without documentation of fair labor inputs.

As the effects of the climate crisis push nations to diversify their energy sources to include more sustainable energy solutions, incorporating social sustainability will ultimately move the needle. This year, besides launching the first-ever Design for Freedom Summit where we addressed these issues, we also launched the Earth Equity and Design for Freedom Landscapes Forum, to create biodiversity positive, nature-based solutions in our landscapes, and raise awareness about using sustainable materials free of forced labor.

The sustainable movement is unknowingly linked to forced labor. We do have the ability to use our muscle memory of the green building movement and design for freedom with urgency – for a more humane and restorative future.