On her umpteenth visit to the Philippines, Katie Ford, the founder and CEO of Freedom For All, came bearing great news, read on to find out what it is:
"We are opening a business, a legitimate recruitment business for domestic workers, in the Middle East,” she told Philippine Tatler during an interview before a dialogue on anti-human trafficking where she was the guest speaker. Her first time to go into business again after 11 years since she led the top modelling agency started by her parents, Katie explained why. “So many of the people we freed [from modern-day slavery] were promised different jobs so I thought we ought to be involved in this as well,” she said.
Called HousekeepingCo, its mission is to “offer fair hiring for foreign domestic workers world-wide, to support families in their effective engagement and relationship management, and to train every foreign domestic worker and up-skill set in becoming the best of what they can do.” It’s interesting to note that Katie is back in an agency, in the same industry of placing people in jobs. “It is very similar [to the modelling agency],” she agreed. “In fact, I use the concept [of the Ford Agency] here; and I use the example of what my parents did to modelling.”
In 1946, right after World War II, Gerard and Eileen Ford started the Ford Modelling Agency, or Ford Models. “My parents thought it was normal to pay and to protect the young women. That it was nothing special,” she recalled. “But soon, word spread that Ford was paying its models the best rate, so they began switching to them.” In a way, Katie’s parents helped professionalise the modelling industry because other agencies had to follow suit and pay their models fairly lest they lose all of them to Ford. “My mother was the sales person; my father was the business person. He was very measured; she was the fire,” she shared a fond memory.
When it was her turn to run the agency, Katie took it to even greater heights. But after 22 years in the business, she made a major decision of selling it in 2007.
“I sold it because I wanted to do something that I have not done yet but was very passionate about, and this was to work with indigenous groups. I was already approaching 50, and I was telling myself that if I wanted to do that in my life I have to do it soon. When I still have the energy to travel,” she said.
This interest began so early in her life, when she was just 10, triggered by hearing the bushmen of Africa speak. “Have you heard bushmen talk with their clicks?” Katie said, making clicking sounds herself. “That got me.”
What she did next was curious. When she got married in 1985, she asked her husband if they could honeymoon amongst the tribes. “He wanted it too!” Katie justified her unconventional request. The couple went to Thailand and lived with the H’mongs and the Karens. “It was not somebody’s typical idea of a honeymoon to be living in a place where women would chop gruel while babies suck from their breasts then give the gruel to the pigs who were also in the house, just a few feet from where we were sleeping,” she remembered.
