Introducing SafetyNexus and the Safe & Together Digital Coach and Insight Engine
For 20 years, the Safe & Together Institute has focused on one goal: helping professionals make better decisions for children and adult survivors impacted by domestic abuse.
Through training, coaching, and implementation support, we’ve helped thousands of practitioners around the world build the knowledge and skills to recognise perpetrator patterns, partner with survivor parents, and keep children safe and together with their protective parent whenever possible.
Along the way, we’ve heard the same challenge from practitioners time and time again: A practitioner leaves four days of Safe & Together training energised and full of ideas, comes back to their desk, and suddenly pauses.
How do I apply this to this family? How do I map these behaviours? How do I prepare for tomorrow’s multi-agency meeting?
That gap—between training and everyday practice—is where practitioners need more support. No practitioner should ever be unsupported when a child and adult survivor’s safety, wellbeing, and liberties are on the line.
Today, we’re expanding how we support practitioners—beyond training and into everyday practice.
We’re introducing SafetyNexus, a sister company co-founded by David Mandel and Ruth Reymundo to build practice-first technology that supports the application of the Safe & Together Model.
We’re also introducing the Safe & Together Digital Coach and Insight Engine—the first tool in development by SafetyNexus to help practitioners apply domestic abuse–informed, trauma-informed, and child-welfare-informed practice in real time.
Why SafetyNexus?
Supporting practitioners beyond training required more than adding another course or resource. It required technology designed around practice from the very beginning.
Before joining the Safe & Together Institute, Ruth spent years in healthcare watching practice become digitised. She learned one thing clearly: a records system does not improve practice. Without a practice layer inside that technology, you simply automate poor practice and make those decisions faster.
When David and Ruth watched social care start doing the same thing—dumping historical, victim-blaming case data into dashboards and setting workers loose on it—it frightened them.
Bias in, bias out.
Rather than build technology that simply made existing systems faster, they set out to build something different: technology grounded in the Safe & Together Model from the start and designed to strengthen professional judgement, not replace it.
Want to hear David and Ruth tell this story themselves? Listen to their special episode of Partnered with a Survivor, where they discuss why they founded SafetyNexus, what concerned them about the direction AI was taking in human services, and how those concerns shaped the vision for the Safe & Together Digital Coach and Insight Engine.
The Safe & Together Digital Coach and Insight Engine
The Safe & Together Digital Coach and Insight Engine brings together four connected capabilities.
An on-demand practice coach: Helping practitioners think through complex cases, map perpetrator behaviour patterns, identify multiple pathways to harm, partner with survivor parents, prepare for difficult conversations, and attend to their own safety and wellbeing.
A private learning environment: Giving practitioners a space to role-play challenging meetings, interviews, and interactions; build skill over time; and receive supportive feedback grounded in the Safe & Together Model.
Documentation support: Helping workers document clearly, prepare reports for courts and colleagues with fidelity to the Model, and audit documentation quality at scale.
A data and insight engine: Providing audit and quality assurance across case files, highlighting practice strengths and opportunities for growth, measuring skill uptake over time, supporting worker wellbeing and collaboration, and helping organisations understand where the Model is embedding and the impact it is having.
Importantly, it works from the worker up. Individual practitioners see their own learning and development first, followed by team and organisational insights.
It is a learning system—not a surveillance system. The Safe & Together Digital Coach and Insight Engine does not predict risk, score families, or make decisions for practitioners. Instead, it guides workers through their own decision-making using their organisation’s forms, mandates, and risk assessments and the Safe & Together Model.
Human judgement remains at the centre, and it is built to reduce load on workers—not add to it.
Built on the Same Values
Although SafetyNexus is a separate company, it was founded to advance the same vision that has guided the Safe & Together Institute from the beginning: improving outcomes for children and adult survivors by strengthening professional practice.
Survivor governance sits at the highest level of the company’s work and is woven throughout product development. Every decision is grounded in the belief that technology should strengthen accountability, partnership with survivors, and child-centred practice—not dilute it.
What’s Next
Over the past several years, we’ve shared early concepts of the Safe & Together Digital Coach and Insight Engine with partners across Japan, Canada, Scotland, Australia, and beyond. Today, we’re working alongside our first beta partner, a statutory child protection agency in Australia, as we continue refining the platform.
We’re excited about what’s ahead—not because of the technology itself, but because of what it can make possible: better supported practitioners, stronger implementation of the Safe & Together Model, organisations that can see how practice is embedding over time, and, ultimately, better outcomes for children, survivor parents, families, and communities.
Every practitioner deserves support when the work is hardest—not just while they’re in training. That’s what SafetyNexus was created to build.
If you’d like to learn more about SafetyNexus or take part in the beta pilot of the Safe & Together Digital Coach and Insight Engine, we’d love to hear from you.