Sweden · People
Women’s Reintegration (Past Program)
Not For Sale’s people work in Sweden focused on women’s reintegration, supporting survivors of trafficking with pathways to safe housing, employment, and independence. Sweden is a destination country, with victims primarily trafficked into sexual exploitation from Nigeria, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia. The programme has since concluded.
What We Built
Not For Sale Sweden provided reintegration support for women who had been trafficked into Sweden for sexual exploitation, safe housing, counseling, job readiness training, and connection to social services. The Sweden programme was an early proving ground for a principle that would become central to Not For Sale’s global model: survivors do not need saving. They need opportunity. That principle was later scaled into the Dignita Academy in Amsterdam and the Entrepreneurship Challenge in Uganda.
Read the social innovation section below, because Sweden is where Not For Sale first tested the idea that a commercial product could fund anti-trafficking work.
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Sweden · Social Innovation
Not For Sale Ale: The First Social Innovation Beverage
Not For Sale’s social innovation work in Sweden produced one of the organization’s earliest and most audacious experiments: a craft beer that donated 100% of its profits to fight human trafficking. Not For Sale Ale predated REBBL and Dignita, and proved the thesis that a consumer product could be designed from the ground up to serve a social mission.
How It Started
Ulf Stenerhag, founder of Swedish industrial company Thurne Teknik, rallied his employees around the idea of creating a commercial product whose entire profit margin would fund Not For Sale’s anti-trafficking work. The team partnered with Monks Brewery in Sweden to develop the first Not For Sale Ale in Europe.
Days after the first batch was brewed, the beer was served at the Swedish Royal Palace during Dr. David Batstone’s speech at the Young Leadership Conference in 2014. From the Royal Palace, the concept expanded. Stenerhag and his team committed to donating 100% of profits, with initial funding directed toward Not For Sale’s work in Romania and Eastern Europe, regions that are major source countries for trafficking victims found in Sweden and across Western Europe.
The Beer
Not For Sale Ale, Craft Lager, was brewed by Brouwerij de Molen in the Netherlands: a 4.7% ABV hazy blond lager, late- and dry-hopped with Premiant and Cascade hops. Citrus and fruity aromas, with floral and light herbal tones. It was not a charity novelty. It was a genuinely good beer that happened to channel every cent of profit into ending modern-day slavery.
As demand grew, Not For Sale Ale launched in Uganda in 2016, connecting Sweden’s social innovation directly to Not For Sale’s East African field operations and broadening the brand’s reach across two continents.
Not For Sale Ale, 100% of profits fight trafficking
Why Not For Sale Ale Matters
Not For Sale Ale was the organization’s first proof that a consumer product, designed, branded, and sold commercially, could fund anti-trafficking work at scale without depending on traditional philanthropy. If people are going to buy beer anyway, make a beer whose profit fights trafficking.
That thesis became the foundation for everything that followed. When Not For Sale and Just Business convened the Montara Circle in 2011 and the idea for REBBL emerged, the precedent was already set. When Dignita opened in Amsterdam, the same model, enterprise as mission delivery mechanism, was applied to restaurants. When Regenerate Technology Global launched, it was applied to battery recycling.
Not For Sale Ale was small. But it was first. And the line from a craft lager brewed in Sweden to a battery recycling company operating across the EU is straighter than it looks.
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