As Senior Portfolio Director, Forced Labor & Human Trafficking (FLHT), Vijay Simhan leads Humanity United’s largest grantmaking portfolio and makes programmatic and operational adjustments to the strategy. As the FLHT ecosystem faces broad challenges from funding shifts and authoritarian crackdowns against workers and migration, Vijay leads the team and supports HU’s broad array of partners in creating new pathways for labor justice for workers.
Vijay also serves as Director of the Rights and Dignity (RAD) Working Group, which spans across The Omidyar Group (TOG) and exists to support and advance the rights and dignity of communities impacted by structures of oppression and marginalization, by transforming the tools of philanthropy so that we can be better partners to communities working to address the conditions and systems that threaten them.
Before joining HU, Vijay was Program Officer with Winrock International, where he led work on labor rights, migration, and anti-human trafficking projects in Africa, South America, and Asia. This included helping workers organize and advocate for their rights in the agricultural and textile sectors as well as both partnering with and challenging corporate behavior as it relates to labor rights in supply chains in the tobacco and tea sectors.