Meet Annie Dean, Safe & Together Institute’s New COO
For 15+ years, I’ve mentored burnt-out professionals who are looking to break into the tech industry. In 2021, I even founded a company focused on helping these mid-career professionals make the leap into roles where they can represent the voice of the customers their software serves. When I founded RecastSuccess, I envisioned frontline leaders coming from hospitality, logistics, and food service who had found themselves trapped in a career they didn’t choose through life circumstances.
What I didn’t expect was that more than half of our community came from careers they really loved—careers they had invested heavily in, gaining advanced degrees and enduring long certification processes. Social workers, counselors, teachers, and healthcare providers quickly became the majority of our community.
They had hit a wall, feeling like they put in a lot of time and effort with an overwhelming caseload, which made little impact and even, in some cases, caused more harm. They were frustrated by a lack of tools and support. Some shared stories of feeling forced to make different career choices after facing perpetrators at work who threatened those workers’ families, or worse, they personally feared for their safety after they had been assaulted.
We were quite successful in helping these professionals walk away and start something new, but I felt very torn. Our society needs passionate, smart professionals to face some of our biggest challenges. Who will stick up for abused children and moms? Who will be left to help abusers change their ways and become good parents?
What if there was a way to amplify workers’ efforts, make their caseloads more efficient, change broken systems, and protect their personal well-being?
Five of the top 10 “most stressful careers” are impacted by the failures of our systems to shift from approaches that blame victims to ones that focus on perpetrator patterns of behavior in the context of parenthood:
Military personnel
Police officer
Firefighter
Social worker
Broadcaster
Newspaper reporters
Emergency dispatcher
Mental health counselor
Anesthesiologist
ER nurse
I’m proud to join Safe & Together Institute, which has proven results from training thousands of professionals on how to be more impactful in their work and motivating systems change across organizations in a dozen countries. By switching from an incident-focused approach to domestic abuse to a model encompassing a broader pattern of behavior, including coercive control with higher standards of parenting for perpetrators across agencies, we are moving the needle.
We are creating a space for frontline workers to amplify their impact in serving our most vulnerable populations and for workers to thrive in careers they love.
I’m honored to play a small part as we scale our reach and help to keep families safe and together around the globe!