About Blue Borage
Trauma-aware leadership, learning, and courageous conversation.
Blue Borage is an Australian-based coaching, facilitation, and learning practice supporting individuals, leaders, and organisations to engage more consciously in complex human and organisational systems.
Our work brings together trauma-aware practice, leadership development, and facilitated dialogue. We create spaces where people can pause, reflect, and develop shared language for change across personal, professional, and community contexts.
Blue Borage hosts accessible facilitated Conversation Cafés, leadership programs, and deeper learning circles that support clarity, responsibility, and values-aligned action. Some spaces focus on specific lived experience themes, while others centre leadership, communication, and shared inquiry.
Our Approach
At Blue Borage, we work with care, structure, and respect for readiness.
Our approach is relational and grounded in psychological safety, recognising that people arrive with different experiences, roles, and capacities. Lived experience informs our work without defining it, and learning is held as a shared process rather than an expert-driven one.
We draw on established leadership and communication frameworks, alongside trauma-aware principles, to support healthier ways of thinking, relating, and acting over time. The focus is not on fixing people, but on creating conditions where insight, responsibility, and change can emerge.
Our Founder
Susan Dunlop
Founder | Educator | Facilitator | Advisor
Susan founded Blue Borage to create a home for thoughtful conversations and learning that could hold both complexity and care. She brings over 25 years of executive leadership, mentoring coaching, and facilitation experience across healthcare, community, and mission-led organisations. Her work spans leadership development, trauma-aware education, psychosocial wellbeing, and systems change.
Susan’s lived experience informs her work without defining it. It complements her leadership practice and shapes how she holds space with dignity, steadiness, and curiosity. She is known for her calm presence and her ability to support people and organisations to move from reactive patterns into clarity and values-aligned action.
Susan serves on the Advisory Board of 5WAVES (USA), contributing to international survivor-led advocacy and systems change relating to sibling sexual trauma and abuse.
Based in Noosa, Queensland, Susan works locally and globally across coaching, facilitation, education, and advisory contexts.
Why Blue Borage?
Inspired by the Blue Borage flower, historically associated with courage, Blue Borage reflects a belief in human steadiness, reflection, and the capacity to meet life and leadership with care.
The work is guided by a commitment to dignity, safety, and thoughtful engagement, supporting individuals and organisations to co-create healthier cultures and more considered ways forward.
Contact Us
If this approach resonates with you, you’re welcome to explore what’s on offer or reach out for a conversation.
