Our Story and Team

Our Story

Most organizations manage the risks in children's digital lives through a rear-view mirror. Attendance records tell them who stopped coming. Incident systems tell them what went wrong. Policies tell them what should have happened. By the time any of it reaches a desk, a child has already been hurt.

We built Ctrl+Shft, the technical infrastructure powering Safe on Social to see the smoke.

The world does not need another online safety program. It needs to see harm earlier, while there is still time to do something gentle and human about it. A conversation instead of a crisis. A lesson instead of a lawsuit. A child who is noticed, rather than a child who is found.

Safe on Social was founded in 2009 by Kirra Pendergast, at a time when most adults still thought of social media as something children would grow out of. Kirra came to this work from the inside of the internet itself. Her career began in the early infrastructure of the web and it trust and security systems.

She learned how systems are built, how they are broken and how quickly harm travels through them. Then she turned all of it toward the people those systems were never designed to protect: children.

When Kirra Pendergast and her co-founder Will Anstee set out to build something that could protect children at a global scale, they made one rule: only the best.

Will, our Global CEO, brought the commercial discipline and financial clarity that turn a mission into an vehicle for positive social impact at scale.

Together they went looking for the people who had already proven themselves where it matters most. Not the loudest voices in the room, but the ones who had sat with families in crisis, built systems that held under pressure and earned their expertise one hard case at a time.

Every founder, partner and leader at Safe on Social was invited for the same reason. They are, quite simply, the people you would call first.

Five specialist lanes. One whole child.

A child's online life never arrives in neat categories. A worrying post sits beside school refusal, an unmet learning need, a mental health concern or a predator's patient approach. So our intelligence is earned across five specialist lanes, each led by recognised frontline practice, and brought together so that nothing falls between them.