During a national training in 2024, a survivor of sex trafficking turned to Jeanne Allert, founder and executive director of the Institute for Survivor Care, with a question that stopped her mid-sentence: “Miss Jeanne, if there are peer support specialists for issues like addiction, why isn’t there a peer support program for us survivors?”
The Institute for Survivor Care leading its Certified Peer Support for Exploitation certification course / Photo via social media
“I was stilled,” Allert said. “Sometimes the Holy Spirit makes the path irrefutably clear.”
For nearly two decades, Allert said, the anti-trafficking field has repeated the same pattern: identifying a survivor who is doing well and putting her on stage, on camera, or into a leadership role, sometimes within months of her exiting exploitation. “Perhaps in an effort to inspire donors, or to check a box on a grant requirement, agencies have been overzealous to do this,” Allert said. “It hasn’t worked out well.”
A 2023 review published in the Journal of Public & Nonprofit Affairs found that offering trafficking survivors volunteer roles in place of paid, trained positions functions as a form of tokenism rather than genuine inclusion. Allert said the pattern has cost the field survivor leaders it could not afford to lose.
“Far too many survivors were lifted onto the pedestal of ‘survivor leader’ only to find they were unprepared for how demanding and lonely that role can be,” she said. “Some fell. Some relapsed. Some left the field discouraged. And some agencies faced accusations of re-victimization.”
Allert said she saw the alternative work firsthand during the 13 years she spent running a trafficking shelter, where a survivor many years removed from exploitation served on staff as a companion and guide to residents. “She was a critical, empathetic bridge between our residents’ old life and their new one,” Allert said. “We knew it could work. We just didn’t know how to replicate it nationally.”
The Institute’s 2025 study, Exiting Exploitation, later reinforced the point: survivors reported wanting role models who had exited exploitation and could help guide their own recovery.
Access to MinistryWatch content is free. However, we hope you will support our work with your prayers and financial gifts. To make a donation, click here.
Within months, the Institute — working alongside its cadre of survivor advisors — had built the nation’s first standardized credential for survivors of sex trafficking entering peer support and ministry roles: the Certified Peer Support for Exploitation program, known as CPSE.
CPSE takes roughly nine months to complete, and admission is deliberately selective. Candidates must be at least five years removed from their own exploitation, free of substance dependency, hold a GED or diploma, and provide references and complete an interview before acceptance.
“The bar is high on purpose,” Allert said. “Survivors told us directly that being taken seriously matters to them as much as being cared for. As we always said in shelter care, responsibility is dignity.”
Training includes 28 hours of online coursework and weekly check-ins, followed by a week-long, in-person intensive at a Christian retreat center in Indiana, where the cohort trains and builds relationships together. After a supervised practicum with a partnering anti-trafficking agency and a final exam, candidates earn the CPSE credential. Coaching continues monthly for a full year afterward — support Allert said most peer-support programs never offer. “Once certified, she joins a community of leaders across the country,” Allert said, “peers she can lean on, pray with, and encourage through every part of life.”
The program’s guiding verse, Allert said, is 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 — the God “who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.”
“You can’t give away what you don’t have,” Allert said. “Once you’ve received that comfort yourself, you’re equipped to give it to someone else. That’s the whole model.”
Nine survivors completed the program’s pilot cohort in 2025. Eleven more are set to graduate in October 2026. Graduates have come from Arizona, Texas, Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Florida, and now work in residential care, jail ministry, outreach, and advocacy. The Institute is currently raising funds for a 2027 cohort and already has a wait list of candidates.
Allert said the goal now is to scale. “We want CPSE to become a standard position in anti-trafficking agencies nationwide,” she said. “A trained, equipped, and supported survivor leader in every organization that serves this population.”
The Institute for Survivor Care earns a perfect 100 Donor Confidence Score in the MinistryWatch database, as well as an A Transparency Grade and a 4-Star Financial Efficiency Rating.
Dr. Jeanne L. Allert is the Founder and Executive Director of the Institute for Survivor Care and has led the field of survivor care for nearly two decades — first as founder of The Samaritan Women, the Mid-Atlantic’s first residential program for trafficking survivors, and now building the research, training, and credentialing standards used by shelters nationwide. She holds a Ph.D. in trauma-focused care from Regent University and has authored nearly a dozen peer-reviewed studies on sex trafficking and survivor care.
TO OUR READERS: The mission of MinistryWatch is to help Christian donors become more faithful stewards of the resources God has entrusted to them. Do you know of a story that will help us fulfill our mission, or do you want to give us feedback about this or any other story? If so, please email us at info@ministrywatch.com.