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.
– Written by Aarti Kapoor (Executive Director at Embode)