About the
Sense of Safety Project
Our Mission
The Sense of Safety Project researches, educates, and champions Sense of Safety as a community priority.
Our Vision
We look forward to a future where communities learn to build Sense of Safety so they can see, hear, and care for each other – especially those who have suffered most.
The Need
When people don’t feel safe, their alarmed bodies become unwell in multiple ways. Current focuses on precise objective evidence can cause a narrowed gaze where parts are assumed to be the whole. Surface symptoms and behaviours are named and treated, while deep internal and external causes of threat go unnoticed.
Where Sense of Safety fits in:
Feeling safe is a whole person experience that enables healthy functioning from the cellular to the communal: our nervous and immune systems, our social engagement systems, our executive functioning, and our communal and spiritual wellbeing.
Sense of Safety is a pre-requisite for health. It is a strength-based health goal that is trauma-informed – acknowledging lived experience and memories. It is embodied, sensory and fundamental to bodily health. Feeling safe is personal – only the person themselves can know how safe they feel – so the Sense of Safety lens requires a focus on the voice of lived experience. We feel safe in relationships and when life is meaningful.
The Sense of Safety lens is a complex integrative approach to the whole person. Maslow said that the unconscious drive toward safety involves the whole person and crosses cultures. He said ‘practically everything looks less important than safety and protection’.
(Maslow, 1943).
This ordinary phrase ‘sense of safety’ has deep integrative and personal wisdom that offers a lens that can help healthcare, education, and public policy practitioners to see, hear and care for people in our community. It is a worthy community priority.
Keep in touch with us via our mailing list!
The Sense of Safety Project is an exciting innovation for community wellbeing. Stay up to date by signing up to receive our intermittent newsletters. Your welcome email will include one of our SOS resources.