This presentation explores the journey from lived experience of exploitation and homelessness to survivor-led organizational leadership within the anti-trafficking sector. Drawing on personal experience and professional practice, the presenter reflects on how early exposure to exploitation, housing insecurity, and system failure shaped both survival strategies and later leadership values. The presentation traces key moments of vulnerability, contact with services, and critical turning points that influenced long-term outcomes. It highlights how well-intentioned systems can unintentionally disempower survivors when lived experience is excluded from decision-making, and how this impacts prevention, safeguarding, and recovery pathways. The narrative then transitions to the presenter’s role as CEO of a survivor-informed charity working across direct support, training, and employer engagement. Particular focus is given to how lived experience leadership reshapes organizational culture, improves safeguarding practice, strengthens ethical responses to exploitation, and supports more sustainable prevention efforts. Rather than centering resilience alone, this presentation critically examines power, voice, and responsibility within anti-trafficking work. It challenges professionals to move beyond consultation toward meaningful inclusion of survivor-leaders in governance, strategy, and system design. The presentation concludes with practical recommendations for practitioners, organizations, and policymakers on embedding lived experience ethically and safely, avoiding tokenism, and creating conditions where survivor-led leadership can thrive. Attendees will leave with concrete insights into how survivor-informed leadership improves outcomes for individuals and strengthens anti-trafficking practice more broadly.
Trigger Warning: This presentation contains information (written, spoken, or visual) that may be triggering or (re)traumatizing to attendees.
Paul McAnulty is a survivor of exploitation and homelessness and the CEO of Rebuild East Midlands, a survivor-informed anti-exploitation charity in the UK. His work bridges lived experience, frontline practice, and organizational leadership, focusing on prevention, survivor-led systems change, and ethical responses to human trafficking and exploitation.