If a child is in immediate danger, call 911. To report abuse, call the Childhelp hotline at 1-800-422-4453. More ways to get help
PPE Kids, The 4 Pillars of Protection PPE KidsProtect · Prevent · Empower
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Our Story

Our founders

A husband and wife who spent forty combined years inside institutions like yours: one in human resources and investigations, one running buildings full of vulnerable people.

Most child-safety programs arrive as a stranger with a checklist. We’re not here to tell you your people are dangerous. We’re here to make it easier for good people to do the right thing on a hard morning.

Osona “Sonni” Wilson
Executive Director & Co-Founder

Osona “Sonni” Wilson

Sonni spent more than twenty years as 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 led human resources at Neighborhood Legal Services, supporting employees across multiple sites, and at Life’s Work of Western Pennsylvania. She was Senior HR Coordinator at Carnegie Mellon University and began her career at UPMC’s Western Psychiatric Institute.

Two decades of investigations taught her the pattern behind nearly every institutional abuse case: someone noticed something and said nothing, because nobody had told them they were allowed to. She built the PPE Kids Safeguarding Framework™ and the Behind the Smile™ curriculum to fix exactly that.

MS, Drexel University · PHR · Trauma & Resilience Certification I, Florida State University · Darkness to Light Stewards of Children Facilitator · Agile HR Certified

Robert “Bob” Wilson
Deputy Director & Co-Founder

Robert “Bob” Wilson

Bob has stood where you stand. He served as a youth pastor at several Pittsburgh-area churches. He remembers the mornings when a volunteer called out sick and a room needed covering right now. He’s not going to pretend those mornings don’t happen. His whole job is designing safeguarding that survives them.

At Allegheny Health Network, he directed facilities across more than 10 hospitals and 500 properties, an 11-million-square-foot footprint, leading teams of up to 250, after a decade supervising facilities for UPMC Health Plan.

At PPE Kids, Bob walks buildings: nursery doors, restroom sightlines, classroom windows, check-in flow, the corner of the hall everyone forgets. Then he names the small, affordable changes that make isolation genuinely difficult. He also founded and co-chairs the Global Child Safeguarding Network and created Lumi.

U.S. Army Infantry · Former Youth Pastor · Lean Six Sigma Green Belt · Certified Scrum Product Owner · AS, CCAC

Why we do this

We do this work for reasons closer to home than a business plan.

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.

Sonni and Bob are also grandparents to a granddaughter with level 3 autism who is non-speaking. Loving her showed them how completely this field had overlooked children like her: children with disabilities, who face a far higher risk of abuse and may never be able to tell anyone in words. When we went looking for a safeguarding curriculum built for her, there wasn’t one. So we built it.

Start with a conversation, not a contract. Thirty minutes, no cost, no obligation. We’ll walk your leadership through the 4 Pillars, look honestly at where your program stands today, and tell you what we’d do first. If PPE Kids isn’t the right fit, we’ll say so and point you somewhere better.

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Meet our Board of Directors, or read our Mission, Vision & Values.

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