The institutions survivors encounter, made worth trusting.
Lived experience expert, public health educator, and subject matter consultant helping schools, criminal-legal, faith communities, mental-health systems, and other government and community response programs recognize institutional betrayal — and repair it.
“To help the institutions survivors encounter every day move from causing institutional harm to becoming places survivors can trust.”
The compassion required to meet people where they are.
The refusal to soften difficult truths that systems need to hear.
The ongoing act of showing up and demanding change.
Institutional betrayal is everywhere survivors turn.
Survivors of gender-based violence encounter institutional betrayal across every system meant to help them and most institutions have received little to no training on recognizing their own role in this harm, let alone repairing it.
What no degree can teach — and the degree too.
Sara Loughrige, MPH, is a lived experience expert, surviving multiple forms of violence and living with disability. She is a uniquely qualified voice working on gender-based violence prevention, institutional betrayal, and survivor-centered systems change today.
She has sat on every side of the systems she now consults on: as someone who has navigated institutional failures firsthand, as a frontline advocate supporting others through those same systems, and as a program leader building the infrastructure meant to help.
Her career spans direct victim advocacy, crisis response, substance use prevention, and public health program development.
She has served as a Victim Advocate supporting crime victims through criminal legal proceedings and a Crisis Hotline Specialist conducting lethality evaluations and crisis de-escalation for high-risk callers. Sara has worked as a Community Educator delivering sexual assault prevention and bystander intervention programs in both K-12 schools and college campuses. She has experience as a Prevention Educator utilizing evidence based prevention curricula in schools and community organizations. In a statewide public health role, she coordinated federal substance use grants for multiple agencies. She has also worked alongside law enforcement agencies connecting individuals seeking substance use treatment with resources and support. She is the Founding Director of a community-based violence prevention organization she built from the ground up: securing grant funding, recruiting and managing volunteer teams, and forging partnerships with community organizations.
Sara holds a Master of Public Health and a Bachelor of Arts, giving her the analytical and programmatic frameworks to translate lived and professional experience into measurable interventions.
She now works with the institutions survivors encounter every day: schools, the criminal-legal system, faith communities, mental-health systems, and other government and community response programs to help them move from causing institutional harm to becoming places survivors can trust.
Her approach is direct, compassionate, and grounded in the lived reality of how systems actually operate and how people actually experience them.
How the practice is organized
Every engagement, training, and assessment sits inside one of four pillars — each grounded in public health method and 14 years of direct, cross-institutional practice.
Gender-Based Violence Prevention
Prevention education for the institutions survivors encounter: schools, criminal-legal, faith communities, mental-health systems, and other government and community response programs.
Institutional Betrayal & Trust Repair
Understanding how systems re-traumatize survivors — and the concrete steps required to stop doing it.
Survivor-Safe Organizational Culture
Assessment, training, and policy development that make an organization a genuine safe haven for disclosure.
Trauma-Informed Systems Change
Applying public health frameworks to create lasting, measurable change in how institutions serve survivors.
What makes it different
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Lived expertise alongside professional credentials. Sara has navigated these systems firsthand, worked within them as a frontline advocate and program leader, and studied them through a public health lens at graduate level.
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Cross-institutional fluency. Over a decade of work across courts, schools, health systems, faith communities, crisis response organizations, and advocacy nonprofits throughout Michigan.
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Wellbeing-informed practice design. A 3–4 engagement monthly cap protects quality, longevity, and Sara's wellbeing — built into the model from day one.
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No institutional loyalty conflicts. As an independent consultant, Sara has no organizational affiliation that limits what she can say, recommend, or name.