In 2023, at the Asia Region Anti-Trafficking Conference, Kanhchany Sipha sat across from Imago Dei Fund Co-Director and Program Partner, Jennifer Oakley, during a tea break and did something a little unconventional: she picked up her napkin and drew a map of Cambodia on it, sketching out the country’s history and her organization’s programming. By the end of the conversation, Jen asked if she could keep it.
“The rest is history,” Kanhchany laughed.
The conversation marked the beginning of what would become a partnership between the Imago Dei Fund and Freedom’s Promise, the prevention-focused, anti-trafficking organization where Kanhchany now serves as the National Director.
For Kanhchany, the mission is personal. She describes herself as living proof of the impact of prevention.
Our mission is to prevent human trafficking, and I am actually that story.
Kanhchany grew up as the middle child in a Buddhist family in Cambodia. At 13 years old, her family experienced financial difficulties, and she found herself without a stable home, responsible for caring for her younger brother. She considered quitting school, but a little voice inside her told her to resist that urge. Using the little savings she had, she enrolled herself in an English-language school, not knowing yet it was a Christian one. She couldn’t have covered the full cost herself, so it was only possible, she says, because someone she never met had donated to keep tuition within reach.
Drawn to the messages of Jesus’s love she heard during a bible study one weekend, she became the first Christian in her family. At 18, she was asked to take over as preschool principal and grew the school from 30 to 110 students in four years. By the time she joined Freedom’s Promise in 2017 as its Business Manager, the school had already changed the trajectory of her life.
Human trafficking is the fastest growing criminal industry in the world, generating an estimated $236 billion USD every year (International Labour Organization). Freedom’s Promise addresses the root causes through a holistic, community-based approach including education, awareness, healthcare, and income opportunities in Cambodia and Myanmar. Since 2007, the organization has seen 2500 children receive education, 9500 participants in training workshops, and 16,000 patients receive healthcare and provided 320 individuals with dignified employment. Kanchhany’s own story is a small-scale version of exactly that approach.
Leading like a Weaver
Over the next nine years, Kanhchany rose through several roles at Freedom’s Promise and now leads the organization from Cambodia, supported by the US team. If you ask Kanhchany if she had ever dreamed of becoming a national director, she would say no, but over time, she came to see her leadership style as that of a “weaver.” As a middle child, she is wired to be a peacemaker and coordinator. In her role, she interconnects people and resources to achieve collective goals, like a spider web rather than a top-down hierarchy.
“I’m not the top dog, the leader who leads with an iron fist,” says Kanhchany, “I’m more like a weaver, weaving people and things together to achieve goals that can only be done collectively.”
That instinct now shapes how she leads Freedom’s Promise, an organization founded in Tennessee, but rooted in Cambodia. The senior leadership team prays together, plans together, and works together, with Kanhchany describing her own role as one of listening as much as directing.
“I’m raising up the next generation,” she explains, describing a leadership philosophy she calls “open space”. First, she leads by example. Then, she gives people across the organization room to take initiative, share ideas, and try things, even when they get it wrong.
“We cannot coach people from afar, or train people from afar, wanting quick results. We have to be there with them for the long run.”
That means showing up in person, not managing from a distance, and letting people fail without pulling the work back into her own hands. “If they fail, it’s okay. Try again, do it again, let’s do it together,” she says. “And then let them teach someone else. I think we all learn best when we get to do.”
That philosophy doesn’t stop at her own team. It’s also how Freedom’s Promise thinks about the communities it works in.
“The boat leaves, but the port remains”
For Freedom’s Promise, local leadership isn’t just an abstract principle, it’s essential for the long-term sustainability of the organization. “The boat leaves, but the port remains,” she shared, using the Cambodian proverb to illustrate that when externally driven projects end, local communities are left holding consequences they were never prepared for. Locally designed and led projects, by contrast, generate emotional, material, and financial ownership, ensuring that the impact remains and the work continues long after any partner steps away.
“Imagine someone in America, who wants to do good,” she explains, “they see a hungry family in a Cambodian village and hand them Hawaiian pizza. It’s well-meant, and completely beside the point.”
Cambodians, she says, know exactly what their neighbors need and how to ask for it, and finding those ingredients together gives everyone involved something outside help alone can’t: dignity. “Even me,” she adds, “when I used my own little savings to enroll myself in that school, it was my little ingredients.”
Kanchhany knows the work will not be finished quickly. Slavery and exploitation, she points out, have existed for thousands of years. But she also knows it was never meant to be carried by one person alone.
“A woman has 100 hands” she says, using the Cambodian expression to explain the resourcefulness, persistence, and strength she sees in the women around her. It’s a long fight, she believes, but one worth investing in, because women, given the chance, prove endlessly resourceful.
Perhaps that is what it means to be a weaver: to keep bringing people together, adding one thread to another, trusting that what is built collectively can endure long after any one of us. It’s also what makes the partnership between Freedom’s Promise and Imago Dei meaningful. The goal is not simply to bring resources from one source to another, but instead to invest in local leadership with trust and dignity. Long before the napkin, we learned that all good partnerships start with listening.
