Sandra L. Bloom, M.D.

Sandra L. Bloom, M.D., is a board-certified psychiatrist and associate professor of health
management and policy and co-director of the Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice at
the School of Public Health of Drexel University in Philadelphia. She is also past president of
the International Society for Traumatic Studies. From 1980 to 2001, Bloom was
medical director of the Sanctuary programs. Her first book, Creating Sanctuary: Toward the
Evolution of Sane Societies, describes the experience of Bloom and her colleagues as they
learned what it means to become “trauma-informed.”

In 2005, Bloom partnered with Andrus Children’s Center to establish the Sanctuary Institute
to train a wide variety of human service delivery programs in the Sanctuary model, a trauma-informed approach to organizational change. She currently serves as distinguished fellow of Andrus Children’s Center and has developed over 100 programs nationally and internationally in adopting the Sanctuary model. These programs include residential settings for children, group homes, schools, substance abuse programs, shelters, outpatient facilities, child welfare agencies and juvenile justice programs. Bloom is a past president of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. A new book, co-authored with Brian Farragher, chief operating officer at Andrus Children’s Center, is Destroying Sanctuary: The Crisis in Human Service Delivery, published by Oxford University Press in 2010. The third volume of the series, Restoring Sanctuary: A New Operating System for Organizations, will be published this year.