The bigger picture
Modern slavery isn't a problem from history books — it's happening right now, at a scale that's genuinely hard to picture. Here's how big it really is, where our work fits into it, and why that still matters.
The scale of it
Modern slavery includes forced labor, debt bondage, forced marriage, and human trafficking. It touches every region on earth — and it's getting worse, not better.
Now zoom in
This is where TLUCF works. It's one corner of the crisis above — and it's still enormous on its own.
Religious minorities — Christians make up less than 2% of Pakistan's population — are represented at brick kilns far out of proportion to their numbers. In some kilns, up to 80 of every 100 workers are Christian. It's part of why TLUCF's work is focused specifically on Christian families at these sites.
Where we fit in
There's an old story about a man walking a beach after a storm, where the tide had stranded thousands of starfish above the waterline. He came across a child picking them up one at a time and throwing them back into the sea.
"There are thousands of them," the man said. "You can't possibly make a difference."
The child picked up another starfish, threw it into the waves, and said, "It made a difference to that one."
We think about that a lot. Against 3.5 to 5 million bonded laborers in Pakistan's brick kilns — against 50 million people in modern slavery worldwide — TLUCF has freed 130 people so far: 98 children and 32 adults, across three brick kilns. We're not going to pretend that's a large number. It isn't.
But every one of those 130 people is someone's mother, father, son, or daughter, and they are free today because someone decided that one starfish still mattered. We're still walking the beach.
This grid isn't drawn to scale — if it were, the gold dots representing the 130 people TLUCF has freed wouldn't be visible at all against the millions still trapped. That's the honest scale of it. It's also why every single freed family counts.
people freed by TLUCF so far — 98 children and 32 adults, across three brick kilns in Pakistan. One family at a time.
The scale of this crisis is enormous. Your gift doesn't have to solve all of it — it just has to reach one more family still waiting.
