RESTORATIVE CLINICIAN/ WELLNESS GUIDE
Sarah Laughlin, LCSW, is TPP’s Restorative Clinician and Wellness Guide and resident softie. She has been working with and learning alongside currently and previously incarcerated people for over a decade and can’t imagine doing anything else. Her professional experience encompasses a wide range of environments from healthcare to residential to correctional settings to international programming, and seeks to address the multifaceted impact of systemic oppression on the individuals within them seeking care. She adores being a part of the TPP team and the way that she is encouraged to come to work as her full and authentic self.
Sarah practices social work through an abolitionist and restorative justice lens, a stance rooted in both personal and professional experience. A survivor of sexual violence herself, Sarah credits her work with responsible parties as having the most significant impact on her own healing journey. She seeks to elevate the essential truth that those who cause harm are more often than not survivors themselves and fully deserving of support, love, and healing. Sarah is a fierce advocate of Restorative Clinical Practice and the ways in which it confronts traditional client-clinician power structures and centers lived experience as expertise. She identifies strongly with the notion that “abolition is about presence, not absence- it's about building life-affirming institutions” and seeks to be a part of the rising tide pushing for thoughtful alternatives to incarceration.
Outside of her work with TPP, Sarah works with the Committee for Public Counsel as a Social Service Expert where she provides holistic defense support to both pre-trial and parole clients. She is also an avid writer and poet who uses her affinity for the creative arts as a channel for both personal and communal liberation and advocacy. Her most recent publications can be found in WBUR, and her TEDX talk “Abolition as a Survivor-Centered Response to Harm” can be found on Youtube.
Sarah practices social work through an abolitionist and restorative justice lens, a stance rooted in both personal and professional experience. A survivor of sexual violence herself, Sarah credits her work with responsible parties as having the most significant impact on her own healing journey. She seeks to elevate the essential truth that those who cause harm are more often than not survivors themselves and fully deserving of support, love, and healing. Sarah is a fierce advocate of Restorative Clinical Practice and the ways in which it confronts traditional client-clinician power structures and centers lived experience as expertise. She identifies strongly with the notion that “abolition is about presence, not absence- it's about building life-affirming institutions” and seeks to be a part of the rising tide pushing for thoughtful alternatives to incarceration.
Outside of her work with TPP, Sarah works with the Committee for Public Counsel as a Social Service Expert where she provides holistic defense support to both pre-trial and parole clients. She is also an avid writer and poet who uses her affinity for the creative arts as a channel for both personal and communal liberation and advocacy. Her most recent publications can be found in WBUR, and her TEDX talk “Abolition as a Survivor-Centered Response to Harm” can be found on Youtube.