What emerges when you choose to see a person’s full potential rather than their wounds?
What emerges when you choose to see a person’s full potential rather than their wounds?
When Sarah Gun decided to transform her event management company, GOGO Events, into a social enterprise, she unknowingly laid the foundation for a new kind of village. A village where belonging, worthiness, self-love, contribution, dignity, joy, and dreams can flourish.
From her home in Adelaide, Australia, Sarah began hiring women facing homelessness and social marginalization to work at GOGO Events.
“I went to my clients, and I said, ‘Well, you can do it the old way, or you can do it this new way. .. And if you don’t want to work with GOGO, then you need to find another provider… and most of them stayed.’”
While buoyed by her client’s support, Sarah faced immense pushback everywhere else she turned.
“Every system, every person I came across told me that what I was doing was impossible…”
Her sense of isolation was further compounded by the revelation that she wasn’t just challenging a broken system; she was challenging a much deeper disparity in values.
“The biggest wake-up for me was realizing that not everyone feels the same as I do about what matters. And then how do you manage the conflict personally between what you value and what society tells you?”
Despite feeling alone in her journey, Sarah forged on. She had witnessed transformation after transformation of the women coming through GOGO’s doors and knew she had to keep going – for them and for herself.
“What we’re able to do is look at the value of lived experience…once women understand that their superpower is that they have managed to survive through incredible complexity, volatile environments, all the things….and you flip that on its head and say ‘you are full of power and strength’ with a heart-centered approach then they learn not to be angry, but to walk alongside their anger or hurt or pain and still move forward. That is their superpower.”
Sarah finally found a community that saw what she was doing and said, ‘yes, we want to support you.’
That community was Coralus. In 2015, GOGO Events was one of the first 5 Australian ventures, and Sarah’s small business employing homeless women found its first funder.
“My work is valued at Coralus… that gives me courage and hope.”
Early on, she recalls attending a Coralus event where two women were presenting an animation of the City of London. The buildings represented different industries, such as banking and pharmaceuticals, and the buildings grew higher and higher based on the importance of those industries.
“Then they said, ‘What if we centred everything around care and we had care as the tallest building?’… it opened the doors to seeing the world in completely different ways.”
Over the past ten years, Coralus has continued to be a source of inspiration, guidance, and support for Sarah.
“[After George Floyd] we unpacked racism…I learned to sit in discomfort. I learned that at Coralus, which was incredible.
And, after years of trying to convince people to value what I value, MJ taught me about being the water versus the rock. To find the flow, find your people and stop trying to change everyone.”
As Sarah found her flow with Coralus, she realized that GOGO Events couldn’t carry the load of what she wanted to do alone. In 2017, she founded GOGO Foundation to support the social enterprise’s work and ensure a successful transition to work for at-risk women on the GOGO team.
In 2026, Sarah closed the doors to GOGO Events to focus her energies fully on GOGO Foundation. It wasn’t an easy road to this decision, but COVID had forced her to rethink and restructure her way of operating.
“I was a bit stubborn in thinking that our social enterprise could pay [for] the care that was needed.”
In 2021, the Foundation launched its Inclusive Work Program, which had been co-designed with women who had experienced social marginalization. The free 9-week course combines practical work skills with wrap-around psychosocial support, wellbeing sessions, physical therapy, fitness, and art therapy.
“Within six months of going through the program, 57 % of these women are in vocational study or safe, sustainable employment. That’s more than 5 times the 11.7% national benchmark for a comparable cohort, and more than double the 22.7% sustainable outcome rate of Workforce Australia Services.”
The large majority of participants also reported increased mental health and well-being (72%), clarity on their career path (92%), and an increased sense of social connection (74%).
These unparalleled outcomes aren’t a fluke; they are a reflection of Sarah’s wrap-around philosophy for transformation and a program design that’s anchored in love and self-acceptance.
As she bids farewell to her social enterprise and prepares to lead GOGO Foundation into its next chapter, she reflects on one of the hardest part of the journey over the past 14 years – feeling invisible.
“Being unseen is being disempowered… that’s where most of the work has had to go. My personal work is being seen… It’s like I’m invisible. And the irony of that is that my women, the GOGO women, are unseen… So many of these women have never been asked what they would like to be.”
And yet, even while Sarah continues to navigate the hurdles of being invisible to funders and politicians, she’s created something extraordinary: a village where the invisible finally feel seen.
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