About Blue Borage
Trauma-aware leadership, learning, and courageous conversation
Blue Borage is an Australian-based practice supporting individuals, leaders and organisations to engage more consciously within complex human and organisational systems.
Our work brings together trauma-aware practice, leadership learning, and facilitated dialogue, held as a shared practice rather than an expert-driven process. We create spaces where people can pause, reflect, and develop shared language for change across personal, professional, and community contexts.
This includes work in areas of intrafamilial harm, complex family systems, and long-term recovery, where silence, uncertainty, or entrenched patterns can shape how people relate, respond, and lead.
Through Conversation Cafés, leadership learning, and shared inquiry, Blue Borage contributes to clearer thinking, shared responsibility, and values-aligned action.
Our Approach
At Blue Borage, the focus is on creating the conditions for insight, responsibility and meaningful change to emerge over time.
The approach is relational and grounded in psychological safety, recognising that people arrive with different experiences, roles, and capacities. Lived experience informs the work without defining it, and learning is held as a shared process rather than an expert-driven one.
Rather than offering fixed answers, the work supports people to better understand what is happening within themselves, within relationships, and within the systems they are part of, and to respond with greater awareness and intention.
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 sits at the intersection of lived experience, leadership, and systems awareness, with a particular focus on how people and families respond to complex and often unspoken forms of harm.
Susan is an Advisory Board Member of 5WAVES (USA), contributing to international survivor-led advocacy and systems change relating to sibling sexual trauma and abuse. She also contributes lived experience insight to research and practice in Australia and works in connection with global networks of survivors, practitioners, and researchers.
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, traditionally associated with courage, Blue Borage reflects a belief in human readiness, 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 engage with complexity and move toward 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.
