Kirra Pendergast

Founder of Safe on Social and CTRL+SHFT, Kirra Pendergast is a Human-Centred Technology Risk Futurist Strategist, a systems thinker who doesn’t just respond to tech-driven harm but anticipates it.

Her work maps the cultural, emotional, and legal fallout of emerging technologies and builds proactive frameworks to prevent it. Where traditional technologists forecast features, she forecasts impact. Where compliance asks, “Is this legal?”, she also asks, “Is this ethical, survivable, and just?”.

With over 30 years of experience, Kirra is a global authority on human-centred digital risk, psychosocial safety, and online governance. She has been at the forefront of building systems that protect people, not platforms.

A former director at Verisign, Capgemini, and Avanade, Kirra led whole-of-government cybersecurity and identity governance programs before turning her focus to digital safety reform after surviving a sustained cyber abuse campaign in 2013. That trauma catalysed the founding of Safe on Social, which became the largest independent and unbiased digital safety education agency globally.

Her influence spans more than 1,200 organisations across five continents. She has advised national governments, contributed to legislative reform, and designed industry-first frameworks.

In 2025, Safe on Social evolved to CTRL+SHFT in partnership with Maggie Dent, Dr. Brad Marshall, and Madeleine West. CTRL+SHFT is a multidisciplinary coalition focused on protecting every school, family, and workplace from emerging digital harms.

Kirra is known for her ability to blend deep technical fluency with trauma-informed system design, regulatory intelligence, and culture-shifting education.

Your mission is not just aligned with my values, but also a world I’ve spent three decades fighting to build. Your vision of an internet where children are not surveilled under the guise of safety, where AI serves families rather than taking from them, and where ethical responsibility sits at the core of technology design is essential. And it reflects precisely the standard of digital integrity I have fought to institutionalise across governments, education systems, and private industry.