Clinton Global Initiative Highlights The Body Shop Campaign

Our Global CEO Sophie Gasperment joins dignitaries and leading trafficking experts to announce The Body Shop’s innovative “Stop Sex Trafficking of Children and Young People” campaign at the Human Capital Plenary Session at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York on Thursday, September 24th.

Everyday, everywhere, children are bought and sold into sexual slavery. This simply should not happen in any lifetime, let alone the 21st Century. It is why we at The Body Shop have recently launched our Stop Sex Trafficking of Children and Young People campaign. Across the world we have 2,500 stores in more than 60 countries. We have an amazing opportunity to talk to customers every day to help make a difference. As you might know in the US and Canada, The Body Shop has partnered with ECPAT-USA, Beyond Borders and the Somaly Mam Foundation to raise awareness, raise funds and make a difference.

Just last week, the CEO of The Body Shop International, Sophie Gasperment came to New York to take part in the Clinton Global Initiative to talk about our commitment to helping bring an end to child sex trafficking.

The CGI Annual Meetings have brought together more than 100 current and former heads of state, 14 Nobel Peace Prize winners, hundreds of leading global CEOs, major philanthropists and foundation heads, directors of the most effective non-governmental organizations, and prominent members of the media with a goal of tackling some of the world’s most challenging issues. These CGI members have made more than 1,400 commitments valued at $46 billion, which have already improved more than 200 million lives in 150 countries.

During this year’s Annual Meeting, our campaign was recognized by CGI as an ‘exemplary approach to addressing a specific global challenge,’ and Sophie met with Former President Bill Clinton on stage to accept the honor.

We know that sex trafficking of children is a hard subject to confront and disturbing to think about. But we know that change is possible. Not only have we seen an incredible response from our customers in the first 8 weeks since the campaign was launched but also our teams are deeply passionate about this issue, and they want to make a difference too.

All this makes us very optimistic for the future of this campaign. So, we hope that you will join us on this journey and continue to work with us to help bring an end to child sex trafficking.

See The New York Times for recent news on the campaign.

Shelley Simmons
Director of Values, Americas

This entry was posted on Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 12:53 pm and is filed under The Body Shop Values & Campaigns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.