2 September 2025

Hestia colleagues, Ilaria Ferrari and CEO Patrick Ryan are both nominated for Anti-Slavery Day Awards, which recognise outstanding contributions to the fight against modern slavery.

Each year the Human Trafficking Foundation hosts the Anti-Slavery Day Awards to recognise the work done by the media and individuals to highlight and tackle modern slavery.

Empowering Survivor Voices

Ilaria Ferrari, Innovations Manager at Hestia, has been nominated in the category of Empowering Survivor Voices. This category celebrates those in the sector whose work is consistently informed by the lived experienced of survivors.

Her nomination, submitted by one of the survivors Hestia supports, explains that:

“Ilaria supports survivors to not only recover, but to then go on to shape services, strategy, and national policy. Ilaria’s leadership has set a new standard for survivor-centred innovation and lasting, systemic change.”

Best opinion piece

Patrick Ryan, Chief Executive at Hestia and Talia Coroniti, Director at Thinks Insight, have been co-nominated for a Media Award in the category of best written opinion piece dealing with modern slavery.

The Media awards recognise the work of those bringing the nature and prevalence of modern slavery and human trafficking to public audiences in an accurate and effective way. The opinion piece ‘MPs must wake up to the scale of our modern slavery crisis’ was co-authored by Patrick and Talia in October 2024 for Politics Home, to share the findings of Hestia’s research ‘On Our Streets: The changing face of modern slavery in London’.

The article highlights that both the public and politicians underestimate the prevalence of modern slavery in the UK and misunderstand who is impacted. These misunderstandings are impacting UK policy, the experience of victims and survivors of modern slavery, and our effectiveness in tackling this crime.

The award winners will be announced at a ceremony in October.

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