Introducing the SAFE Model: A New Way to Build Strength, Not Just Solve Problems
For over two decades, I’ve worked across youth justice, education, truth-telling, and business. I’ve led healing camps, facilitated boardroom strategy, and sat beside Elders and young people as they shared the hardest parts of their stories.
What I’ve come to understand is this: real change doesn’t happen without safety.
Not just physical safety, but emotional safety. Cultural safety. Systemic safety.
And too often, the systems we ask our people to navigate weren’t built for us to be safe in.
That’s why I created the SAFE Model — a strengths-based framework designed to support individuals, organisations, and communities to move from survival to strength.
What Is the SAFE Model?
The SAFE Model works across three interconnected domains:
SAFE in Self
Personal healing, life skills, emotional awareness, and confidenceSAFE Organisations
Structural change, leadership development, cultural safety frameworks, and shifting away from deficit narrativesSAFE Communities
Truth-telling, cultural governance, economic independence, and collective healing
At the intersection of all three is where transformation lives.
This model isn’t a theory. It’s built from lived experience — from running youth camps, mentoring kids in care, running businesses, and watching our mob try to find their place in workplaces and communities that often don’t understand them.
Why It Matters
We’ve had programs, pilots, and policy papers for decades. Some have helped. Many have not. What we need now is something different — pathways, not just projects.
The SAFE Model helps build pathways by putting culture, safety and strength at the centre of the work.
How It’s Used
The SAFE Model now sits at the heart of the Buneen Group:
Buneen Consulting uses it to embed cultural safety and governance reform
Buneen Recruitment applies it to prepare both jobseekers and employers for long-term success
Dreaming Futures weaves it into healing programs for young Aboriginal people in care
