Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Christine Ege. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Christine, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s talk legacy – what sort of legacy do you hope to build?
My desire is to make an impact on three fronts:
1. To seek freedom for those in the sex trade through outreach initiatives — personal encounters with sex industry workers — individuals who need to know they have value, who need someone to listen to and affirm them, who need to know they can see their dreams fulfilled and are not stuck forever in patterns of exploitation;
2. To train each of our organization’s volunteers to educate those they serve about human slavery and how easy it can be to become ensnared in it;.
3. To educate the public about human trafficking through awareness sessions and seminars;
In other words, I would like to be remembered as having a passion for the above initiatives with the ultimate goal of making our communities safer for generations to come.
Christine, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Having grown up with parents who affirmed every dream I ever had and who paid for my college education, I was able to benefit from opportunities to study multiple foreign languages and ultimately train to be an interpreter/translator. I subsequently married and lived several years in Europe due to my husband’s profession. Decades later, our college-age children began talking about human trafficking. Initially, I had no understanding of what was involved in modern-day slavery, but I became determined to educate myself about it. It was only a matter of a few months before I discovered that Houston (where we had lived for a number of years) was a notorious hub for human trafficking. Together with a small group of friends, I participated in a few training sessions with local organizations and was not at all certain how I could contribute in helping to solve this terrible problem. After 13 years of homeschooling and considerable experience in tutoring, I reasoned that I might be able to tutor rescued teenage sex trafficking survivors. That never came to pass, as another dream began to take shape.
As I learned more about trafficking and the various ways individuals of any age might find themselves stuck in the sex industry, I realized that there was a very fine line that distinguished me from a trafficking victim — largely made up of circumstances. No amount of genius or talent can guarantee a disadvantaged, poverty-stricken child (often born to a family fraught with addictions and abuse) a stellar future. What separated me from a human trafficking victim was simply a foundation of healthy relationships and supportive parents.
I also realized that all forms of injustice begin when we objectify, de-personalize, de-humanize, and ultimately commoditize another person or group of people. All slave trades throughout history are rooted in viewing those different from ourselves as inferior and lacking value. Selling a person means we view that individual as a thing rather than a person.
In early December 2011, a friend and I stepped into a strip club for the first time. We never intended to establish a ministry and never imagined visiting sex industry workers on a regular basis. It simply happened. Now, after over 13 years of regular outreach initiatives to sex industry workers in strip clubs, brothels, and sex shops, I have friends in the sex industry. Nobody really wants to be there, but no one really knows how to get out or what to do if they could exit that industry. Our job is to listen. We also make an effort to affirm their talents, gifts, potential, and future as best we can. When they ask, we refer them to trusted service providers. We don’t stage rescues, as my team and I are not trained to carry out rescue operations. We also do not wish to compromise the relationships of trust that we have been privileged to develop with club managers, madams, and sexually-oriented business owners over the years. (They wouldn’t trust us if we were organizing extractions of their employees.) Most people in the sex industry have never experienced relationships that are not transactional in nature. Our purpose is to demonstrate that we genuinely care about each person we meet. (If someone needs assistance in exiting the industry, we refer to those trained to assist them, but we do not stage any part of that process.)
Besides kindness and affirmation, our “currency” is cookies … lots of them. Over the course of 13 years, we have distributed 350 large artisan cookies to an average of 175 people (each person gets 2) every two weeks. Along with the cookies, each person receives a handwritten personal one-line note of encouragement unique to each recipient. That has amounted to over 8000 cookies and 4000 notes per year for a total of over 104,000 cookies and 52,000 notes given away over the past 13+ years.
Beyond the countless conversations, laughter, tears, and efforts to encourage and refer sex industry workers, our team of volunteers opened a nonprofit bakery/café sales outlet in March of 2023. At that sales location, we sell a variety of frozen artisanal baked goods and main dish items to the public to support outreach to the sex industry, raise public awareness of trafficking, and to build for a future under-one-roof location. We currently work in three kitchens plus the sales outlet, on top of sustaining regular outreach initiatives. The future brick and mortar Ark Bakery & Café will provide a sense of community, as well as fair-wage employment for individuals wishing to exit the sex industry.
How do I want to be remembered? I want to people to remember me as someone who puts feet to her faith — someone who values every person, affirms and encourages others without judgment or a hidden agenda. I want to be remembered as having helped change attitudes that traditionally have stigmatized sex industry workers. I want to be remembered as having raised awareness of human trafficking in our community and thereby made our community safer for everyone.
We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.
We produce our own products. In fact, the reason we ended up where we are is that we had no one to fund the outreach initiatives we established to individuals in the sex industry. The few other established anti-trafficking groups we encountered were funded by donors. Those groups were able to prepare beautiful gift bags containing actual gifts, which we could not afford (both of us were mothers of five children, and college expenses were taking a toll). What we DID have, however, was the ability and family tradition of baking. My friend and I had always baked all the bread for our families and prepared meals and baked goods from scratch. Accordingly, we decided to do what came naturally, which was to bake homemade cookies for those in the clubs. They could then be given to the dancers, as well as to male valet parking attendants, security guards, bartenders, managers, and owners. Over the course of a couple of months, we quickly became known as the cookie ladies, well before Boundless Mercy or The Ark Bakery ever came to be. We simply gave what we had the ability to give.
As time passed, the scale of the operation became challenging, and we were baking thousands of cookies in a total of three home kitchens. We also were toying with the idea of selling cookies to the public to pay for the 8000 or so cookies that we were giving away every year. The obstacle was trying to bake more than we were already baking in order to sell anything at all! It so happened that a local church (that happened to have a commercial kitchen with a baker’s rack oven) offered to allow us to use their space to bake all the cookies. That freed up my home kitchen to bake other baked goods people were interested in purchasing. At first, we operated as strictly a cottage industry. However, our customers began requesting “real food” — main dish and side dish items, which legally must be prepared in a commercial kitchen. Another church opened its doors to allow our team to prepare mains and sides one full day a week. Conveniently, we ended up locating a sales outlet nearby to sell everything in a frozen state, and we were spared the expense of buying expensive equipment to produce all the items we were selling (thanks to the commercial kitchens in the two churches). All we had to buy was a large commercial freezer. After less than two years selling what we produce, the non-profit Ark Bakery is the public face of Boundless Mercy; it serves as a place to raise awareness of human trafficking with every purchase and make every crumb count.
Of course, we have navigated a steep learning curve to produce “gourmet comfort food” on a commercial scale for sales, but since we already have a small cadre of volunteers who love cooking or baking, along with others who love to learn and serve the model has worked. In the past year, we have been able to double our volunteer base.
The next goal is to continue doing what I grew up doing — baking and cooking — and move our operations and sales under one roof. THAT is a monumental task, as we will need some capital to get started. However, we are thrilled that everything thus far has happened so organically and naturally. Who would have guessed that a handful of volunteers would grow into managing purchasing, production in three locations, and sales — or that the number of volunteers would grow from around five to fifteen or twenty, then suddenly to around 60 or more within the past year? Who would have guessed that an outreach team of a couple of homeschooling mothers (now grandmothers) could ever develop a customer base for specialty food items to fund their dream of giving sex industry workers a chance at a new career?
Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?
To successfully manage a team and establish and maintain high morale, I strive to use the same strategy and approach that I use when I visit sex industry workers. First, every person matters, and every person has unique experiences, training, gifts, and talents to bring to the table. Secondly, listening is a value I prioritize. I try to listen to our team members when they have suggestions — whether or not I personally think a given suggestion will actually work. I try to incorporate suggestions when I can do so, sometimes even using an idea I doubt will be successful — if it is not a huge risk to try it. We can always re-group if the suggestion doesn’t work as intended and use it as a learning experience, and we might actually discover that the idea I initially considered impractical proves to be a great one! Relationships based on honor, listening (and humor!) are paramount if we are to succeed.
Another very important principle is to release as much control as possible without compromising the integrity of the vision and mission of the business. As a leader, I think a vital key to success is to give away who I am, what I know, and what I do. It’s essential to allow others to try their wings — the goal is to empower those with whom we work to excel. Allowing grace to make a few mistakes is a key quality for building friendships and maintaining high morale. Even with a team of volunteers (we only have one part-time employee, and she volunteers enthusiastically far more hours than her paid work schedule), we need to remember that the organization cannot survive without each person’s efforts.
At Boundless Mercy dba The Ark Bakery & Café, we have been blessed with an incredibly gifted team of stellar people. My greatest joy is to see them learn new skills, use those skills in the context of their own experiences and personalities, and do a better job than I myself could have done.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://thearkbakerycafe.org
- Instagram: arkbakerycafe boundless.mercy
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/arkbakerycafe/ https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100080748609034 (Boundless Mercy)
