Meet Our Founders
Two people who came at the same problem from opposite directions.
Most child-safety programs are built by trainers. PPE Kids was built by an HR investigator and a facilities
operator — because institutional abuse almost never comes down to a single bad hire. It comes down to
whether the paperwork was enforced and whether the building made isolation easy. One of us spent
twenty years on the first problem. The other spent twenty years on the second.
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​​Osona 'Sonni' Wilson, MS, PHR
Executive Director & Co-Founder
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For more than twenty years, Sonni was the person leaders called when something went wrong with a staff member — and, more often, when something felt wrong and nobody could quite name it yet.
She directed human resources for a 135-employee, multi-site, unionized non-profit at Neighborhood Legal Services, where she conducted formal investigations, wrote the findings executives acted on, negotiated collective bargaining agreements, and built the documentation standards and corrective-action protocols the organization ran on. Before that she led HR at Life’s Work of Western Pennsylvania and spent eight years as Senior HR Coordinator at Carnegie Mellon University. She most recently served as a Business Manager with the Virginia Department of Health. She now leads PPE Kids full time.
That career taught her something most safeguarding programs miss. Abuse inside an institution is rarely a screening failure. It is a governance failure. Someone was cleared without documentation. A concern was raised and never logged. A policy existed, but nobody would enforce it against a person with status.
Sonni built the PPE Kids Safeguarding Framework and the Behind the Smile grooming-prevention curriculum to close those gaps. She designed the four pillars, and she wrote the Zero-Access Rule: no adult reaches a child until clearance is complete, documented, and authorized — no exception for donors, for clergy, or for the volunteer who has served faithfully for thirty years.
She is also a survivor of child sexual abuse. She speaks about it deliberately and without drama, because the most useful thing she can tell a room of well-meaning adults is this: the person who harmed her was not a stranger, and there were caring adults nearby who could have interrupted it if anyone had given them permission and a plan. ​​
• MS, Drexel University
• BS, Duquesne University • PHR Certified
• Agile HR Certified Professional
• Trauma & Resilience Certification, Florida State University
• Darkness to Light Stewards of Children Facilitator
• Employment law: FMLA, ADA, EEOC, OSHA, ACA, COBRA
• PA Child Abuse History & FBI Clearance Eligible
Robert “Bob” Wilson
Global Operations Director & Co-Founder
Bob has stood where you stand. He served for a decade as a associate & youth pastor in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and two of his sons are ordained ministers. Ministry is the family vocation.
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So he remembers the mornings when the check-in line was long, a volunteer called out sick, and a room needed covering right now. He is not going to pretend those mornings don’t happen. His entire job is designing safeguarding that survives them.
Bob spent more than twenty years running physical operations where mistakes are not recoverable. As Corporate Facilities Operations Manager at Allegheny Health Network, he directed operations across an 11-million-square-foot footprint spanning more than ten hospitals and 500-plus properties, leading cross-functional teams of up to 250 and serving as internal product owner for the enterprise maintenance management system. Before that he supervised facilities for UPMC Health Plan for over a decade, delivering more than $5 million in renovations without interrupting operations and training more than 500 employees on health, safety, and compliance. His foundation is U.S. Army Infantry.
• U.S. Army Infantry
• Former Associate / Youth Pastor,
• Lean Six Sigma Green Belt
• Certified Scrum Product Owner
• Certified ScrumMaster
• Certified Customer Success Management Professional
• AS, Community College of Allegheny County
At PPE Kids, Bob personally conducts the security training and (virtually) walks buildings with you. Your nursery doors, restroom sightlines, classroom windows, check-in flow, and the corner of the fellowship hall everyone forgets about.
Then he tells you which small, affordable changes make isolation genuinely difficult and supervision genuinely easy — vision panels, half-Dutch nursery doors, single-occupancy restroom approach lines, roaming floor stewards.
He also owns the accountability, incident and reporting systems, including QR-coded anonymous reporting with a version children can use themselves.
Why we do this
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We have reasons closer to home than a business plan.
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Sonni is a survivor of child sexual abuse. Like more than nine out of ten victims, she knew the person who harmed her — and the adults around her were good people who simply had no idea what they were permitted to do.
We are also grandparents to a granddaughter with level 3 autism who does not speak. Loving her showed us how completely this field had overlooked children like her — children at far higher risk of victimization, who may never be able to disclose in words, and whose behavioral signals get read as symptoms rather than as warnings. When we went looking for a safeguarding curriculum built for her, there wasn’t one.
So we built it. It is still the only one of its kind.
That is the whole of PPE Kids: every child, including the ones who cannot tell you.
Start with a conversation, not a contract.
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Thirty minutes, no cost, no obligation.
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We will walk your leadership through the four pillars, look honestly at where your program stands today, and tell you what we would do first. If PPE Kids is not the right fit for you, we will say so and point you somewhere better.
PPE Kids appears in the Southern Baptist Convention’s Abuse Prevention & Response Vendor Resource Listing across six categories — Risk Management, Human Resources, Consulting, Screening, Training, and Operations — more categories than any other listed vendor, and the only abuse-prevention provider listed under Human Resources.