Crest Hill couple works to foster healing in trafficking victims

Salt and Light Coalition of Chicago provides a year of life skills and job training for human trafficking survivors in Chicago, along with helping them adjust to trauma and build trust and community, according to its website.

Ebert’s still teaching improv at Salt and Light and participants have voted him Volunteer of the Year, according to a recommendation letter from Salt and Light founder Izabel Olson.

Olson wrote that Ebert “has displayed kindness, empathy and commitment” to Salt and Light’s mission and that the participants “look forward to his classes, which are interesting, engaging and fun.”

“Improvisation classes have restored confidence, encouraged self-expression and stirred joyful laughter in the women we serve,” Olson wrote.

Encouraged by that success, Dave Ebert and his wife, Bobbie, stepped out in faith and founded Improv Missionaries. Their goal is teaching improv to victims of trafficking full-time as missionaries as well as raising awareness of trafficking.

“Laughter is proven way to break through a lot of those of those barriers,” Dave Ebert said, “so we can see the healing process and the human being come back out from behind the shell.”

Olson and Dave Ebert met in 2018 when Ebert’s Well Versed Comedy troupe performed at a fundraiser for Salt and Light in 2018. Ebert said he wound up sharing his own battle with depression at the event.

He said his willingness to be vulnerable is most likely the reason Olson invited him that night to volunteer at Salt and Light, and Ebert said he readily agreed.

“I immediately recognized a need for laughter in the lives of people who’ve been through literally hell on earth,” Ebert said. “When you go through something like that, you have to put up walls just to survive.”

The Eberts, credentialed ministers with the Assemblies of God, recently completed additional training through The Polaris Project, which launched the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline in 2007. They are candidate missionaries with Assemblies of God U.S. Missions under its Intercultural Ministries window.

“Our hope is that we can advocate and raise awareness sot the point we’re out of job in five to 10 years,” Dave Ebert said.

That’s probably unlikely.

The U.S. Department of State said on its human trafficking website that finding reliable statistics regarding human trafficking is challenging. Reasons are many: trafficking’s hidden nature, the difficulties in identifying victims and sharing that information about stakeholders, and “gaps in data accuracy and completeness,” even from the U.S. National Human Trafficking Hotline, according to the website.

The Human Trafficking Hotline has identified 82,301 cases of human trafficking since its inception – with 164,839 victims identified in these cases, according to the hotline’s website.

So far, the Eberts have worked only with the Salt and Light Coalition in Chicago. But they are actively seeking out other opportunities.

How improv helps victims of trafficking

Dave Ebert said he provides games and exercises around segments of Salt and Light’s curriculum. Each curriculum segment focuses on a pillar: grace, love, faith, joy, peace, justice, service, and hope. Participants do not perform publicly. The focus is developing communication skills and confidence and “tapping into their creativity,” he said.

Some participants develop a relationship with God.

“We found when you tap into your creativity, an image bearer of the ultimate creator, you start to find your identity in Him,” Dave Ebert said.

Olson said Ebert teaches improv fundamentals to cohorts of 20 or so, although the number of participants can vary, she said. She said Ebert is “a very special person” who makes connection easy through humor. That’s especially valuable for traffic survivors who’ve had “really bad experiences with men,” Olson said.

But Ebert understands what the women are going through and is able to “break down barriers in a way that not many people” are able to do, Olson said.

“He is such a safe man,” Olson said. “He shows them you can have a really safe and beautiful relationship with a male in a very safe space.”

Improv helps the participants with workplace skills, such as “thinking on your feet” during interviews, Olson said.

Christina Sansone, 30, a former Salt and Light participant, is now Salt and Light’s program assistant. Although Sansone understood vulnerability was necessary for fulfilling relationships, she said she struggled with being “vulnerable and silly” until she took improv.

“Improvisation classes have restored confidence, encouraged self-expression and stirred joyful laughter in the women we serve.”

—  Izabel Olson, founder of Salt and Light Coalition in Chicago

Sansone said learning to “speak and giggle and laugh” from “such a gentle man” genuinely helped leave her comfort zone. She called Dave Ebert “a light in the world” for encouraging her to be her silly self in front of others. Knowing the other participants weren’t judging her helped, too, Sanson said.

“People are a lot nicer than you think,” she said.

Taylor Holm, 27, Salt and Light’s program manager, said she came into Salt and Light as a participant in 2018 and was part of Dave Ebert’s first improv class. Holm said she was initially uncomfortable but kept “an open mind.” She said improv “brought joy back into my life.”

“I had never done anything like that before,” Holm said. “On top of it, Dave was the first male role model I had seen after being trafficked.”

Before the improv, Holm viewed men as those who would take from her or make her do something for them, she said.

“Meeting Dave, he kind of debunked all those lies I believed based on my experience,” Holm said. “So that was a pretty big deal. It helped me trust men again in the world.”

Bobbie Ebert, who started assisting her husband last year, said participants also get to see a healthy marriage during the improv classes. Bobbie said she previously participated in four, week-long missions to remote parts of Guatemala through the Assemblies of God and felt the call to mission work for a very long time.

“I love to share with the ladies that their hope is in Christ and their future is in Christ,” she said.