Meaningful rightsholder engagement is a practice that requires ongoing learning. We held a community gathering without an agenda that deepened an understanding of people in their contexts. We encourage businesses and organisations to simply meet and engage in order to get related, and practice the art of connecting across communities.
A Community Gathering: In November 2025, Embode hosted a Community Event in Bangkok, Thailand where corporate sustainability leads and Burmese and Cambodian migrant workers got to meet, mingle and share as humans. This was the second of such events Embode has held for AIM-Progress, the first of which was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 2024 with migrants from Bangladesh, Nepal and Myanmar.
Meeting as People: The purpose of the event was simply to enable those working in the everyday world of corporate human rights due diligence (HRDD) to meet, in person, with the types of people they are being called to consider. The migrants from Myanmar and Cambodia were invited for lunch and to bring themselves and their own curiosities.[1]
Suspension a a Project Target: The opportunity inherent in these Community Events is that they are not a formal ‘stakeholder consultation’ or a ‘rightsholder engagement’ where the main mission is to understand a specific company’s standards, impact or to work out what remediation they need. The purpose of this gathering was to engage in meaningful dialogue in order to understand the fundamental importance of context. Being cognisance of the contexts of rightsholders, such as their broader lives that involve unseen hardships, hopes and happenings, enable HRDD processes to be designed more realistically.
Human to Human Connection: People arrived in the midday heat, humidity and bustling Bangkok traffic. The community event was intentionally designed to enable and introduce a connection of lives closer to their contexts, while not forgetting the multiple roles in the room (i.e. workers, sustainability leads, mothers, brothers etc). The 2-hour session was consciously curated to open the space for inquiry and expression through personal stories and perspectives. Like any community gathering, there was food, introductions, play and laughter. People sat in configurations of circles, and chairs moved around to allow facing, talking, listening and seeing.
Modes of Media: Every person was informed and assured of their agency and safety. Communication was enabled through linguistic translation and the rest of the media was left to the other modes such as body language, eye contact and sustained attention. Encountering each other in person, outside of the workplace, in a neutral, comfortable and open space, the senses are relaxed and engaged. The scene was a diverse array of men and women from disparate places, communities, histories and world views on all sides of the gathering.
The Practice: With neither labels nor tables, people sat in full view. A young woman, petite and quiet examining her hands, a young man masked and tattooed with a Tarot card; others had saved their lunch so they could take it home to share with their families as a treat. Each individual listening through their translator who both explained and contained. The corporate folk greeted the community people with warm anticipation, genuine care and gifts to demonstrate what their companies produced. Gradually the conversations began; “tell us about yourself:, “where are you from?” and “what brought you here?”. Without the need for an assessment, impact or reporting, the conversations included anything from the subject of favourite foods to their most difficult hardship. Each participant shared their journey, challenges and hopes. Some even asked questions to the company folk; “what did you have to give up in order to be so successful?” asking one man to a senior corporate lead. Some groups would burst in laughter, while others formed closed huddles where everyone leaned in to listen to a quieter voice. Each small group individuated into its own relationship.
Experience: As the conversations were gently closed out, the room and its space, had palpably shifted. On the one hand, humans felt seen for being more than just workers in a mechanistic world of production and labour. On the other, humans had witnessed just a scratch of what they had already knew intellectually; that behind the concepts and statistics sit an infinite mosaic of untold stories. If complexity is to be worked with through supply chains and structures, policies and laws, it first needs to be better experienced, sensed and realised as a living reality. By the end of the session, the energy was celebratory and everyone was bursting to take photos as keepsakes of the day. Everyone has their own impressions of what they learned, and what they saw in the words and faces of the others.
Shift in Perspectives: Engaging rightsholders is made meaningful when genuine social connection leaves one changed. To be impacted requires us to leave our desks, travel to contexts, and practice engaging with an open mind. In taking up corporate accountability, teams need to be supported to visit places and people who they are accountable to. The urgency is to periodically step beyond the concepts of audits, compliance, scale, procedures, assessments and whatever tool is next going to solve the issues. It is about being confronted with situations and stories without agenda. So that when your do return to that desk, that computer, that report and that target – you are different every time and you are better able to make decisions that matter.
Aarti Kapoor, Executive Director of Embode.
[1] All migrants were invited with full information about the event and freely gave their consent to participate in advance. Everyone was offered a stipend to cover their expenses and were also free to leave at any point.