Sharon Prince, president of Grace Farms Foundation, sitting in front of the iconic Grace Farms building.

NEW CANAAN — A spotlight on child labor and modern slavery used in the food and clothing industries has prompted Sharon Prince, CEO of Grace Farms, to found a new philanthropical effort to ensure all materials in the construction sector are sourced ethically.

The International Labor Organization reports there are 40.3 million victims of modern-day slavery, a stat Prince called “astonishing and horrific.” This, she said, has motivated her to help remove slave labor from the supply chain of new construction including at the New Canaan Library.

Design for Freedom, her new organization, is helping track the source of materials used in the new library project that is expected to be completed in 2023.

Since construction is the largest industrial sector and the most at risk for unethical labor practices, her team has designed a toolkit for companies to improve their supply chain, she said. That toolkit, which was released earlier this year, emphasizes tracing the construction materials back to their sources in an effort to expose the potential of forced labor.

This includes a list of hotspots that are considered to be very high risk for forced labor and child labor, including parts of Pakistan, Afghanistan and India. If a country is on the list, “it does not mean that every manufacturer, of course, is using forced labor, it just signals a reason to investigate that supply chain further and pay more attention to that particular product,” Prince said.

The toolkit includes a questionnaire for suppliers to fill out and a material tracing spreadsheet, since the process can be really hard, because “there's a dearth of data,” according to the Grace Farms CEO. A model letter for organizations to send to suppliers and other companies working on a project is in the toolkit, for them to acknowledge they are pursuing ethical supply chain transparency, and asking them to do so with them, Prince explained. It lists 12 materials associated with unpaid labor, consisting of rubber, bricks, glass fiber and textiles, steel, electronics, timber, stone, copper, iron, minerals and precursors.

Prince readily admits that construction prices may increase when building materials are no longer relying on free labor, but she is urging companies not to calculate their return on investment with the ‘slavery discount.’

Prince recalled an epiphany she had in 2017 regarding the building of Grace Farms, which was designed to be a humanitarian platform to abolish modern-day slavery and gender-based violence, she said.

While making evaluations for a juried contest for the American Institute for Architects, she said she found herself asking if the materials for a children’s school were made with child labor. She said she then quickly saw the irony when realizing the materials used to construct Grace Farms were never scrutinized in that same light.

Seeing a need, she started a working group and has since has gotten commitments from 80 industry leaders, 30 educators in academia, construction firms, engineers, architects, artists and media to engage in the effort. In 2020, she formally launched Design for Freedom and created a comprehensive report on the issue.

Subcontractors working on the library construction project are working with Design for Freedom to trace materials chosen with input from Turner Construction, the firm building the library. Some of the materials include mineral wool insulation, countertops, metal roof panels, wood doors, tile, flooring, lighting, vinyl, glass, steel, PVC piping, and CMU Masonry.

Prince believes Turner Construction “can carry significant weight in terms of shifting the marketplace” and has already distributed information about Design for Freedom to more than 300 other projects.

Prince’s team also has worked with Centerbrook Architects, which designed the building, since they were early leaders in the green, sustainable building movement, according to Prince.

Some groundwork on certifications came from “the effort that has been gone into sustainable environmental auditing,” and a “number of those certifications are adding fair labor audits,” Prince said.

Modern slavery is the “most egregious human rights violation,” Prince said. “We need to stand up and participate in abolishing slavery and other inequities, gender and racial included.”

There are currently five Design for Freedom pilot projects, including the Black Chapel, London; Harriet Tubman Monument, New York, NY; the Arts and Culture Center, New Delhi, India; New Canaan Library; and Temporal Shift by Alyson Shotz, Grace Farms, New Canaan.