2021 Champions of Courage: Jeanne Allert

BALTIMORE, MD. (WBFF)- Jeanne Allert is one of this year’s Champions of Courage honorees and a firm believer in empowering others through education.

Her Baltimore nonprofit has taken in more than one hundred survivors of sex trafficking.

Now through The Samaritan Women, her national model for sustainable shelters is helping lead the fight against human trafficking across the country.

Allert is a former internet consultant with an ever-growing family.

“I have one adult child and she says it must’ve been God’s plan that I would only have one child because I knew I was going to have 100 more shortly there after,” Allert said.

To her children now mostly adult women she’s more fondly known as "Ms. Jeanne."

“It’s something that the women often did voluntarily as a show of respect so we just went with it,” Allert said.

That respect is something she garnered over the years after making it her personal mission to help survivors of sex trafficking.

"We learned more from them what their needs were," Allert said.

The Samaritan Women started taking in young women more than a decade ago offering not just housing but therapeutic, spiritual and academic support.

"The more you learn, it also grows in you a greater appetite to do more and that was true for us,” Allert said. "We started to say we can actually reach more survivors if we shifted into equipping others instead of just trying to do it all ourselves."

Allert recognized there was not only a deficit of shelter programs nationally but also a tremendous number of shelters that were closing.

“So in 2018 we made a very hard choice and said we would pivot into becoming a training and mentoring organization, coupled with research.”

Since then The Samaritan Women has built out a curriculum helping others establish new shelters all across the country.

“Her passion was just invaluable to us as an organization,” Brenda Long said.

Long founded Garden Gate Ranch in central Iowa. The organization provides safe housing and services to sexually exploited women and their children.

"There were things that we hadn’t even thought about that Jeanne brought to the table,” Long said.

“We have set a goal that we would like to establish 24 new shelters by 2024.”

For people like Jeanne there’s always more work to be done.

“My way of responding to this new level of responsibility is one of I need to keep learning so I’m back in school.”

Her impact can be felt not just in the number shelters she’s helped open, but also from the periodic calls she receives from her many children.

“One that they thought to call and say hey Ms. Jeanne I just want you to know I’m doing really good, I’m going to college, I just had a baby, I’m getting married,” Allert said. “It definitely kind of affirms that what we try to create here as a family feel was something we accomplished.”