Kintsugi Heroes

Standards & Safety

How we handle trauma stories, and how we know it's right

Kintsugi Heroes shares real stories of people who have lived through profound adversity. That trust deserves more than good intentions, so everything this platform produces is governed by a written standard: KH-TIC-001, the Trauma-Informed Content and AI Governance Standard (Draft v1.1). We did not invent our own theory of safety. The Standard is built on recognised, in-use frameworks, and this page shows exactly which ones, how each applies, and where the Standard sits in its independent review.

Current status: Evidence-based and aligned to recognised trauma-informed and responsible-AI frameworks. Independent clinical review underway.

What this platform is built on

Kintsugi Studio, the production platform behind every episode, is not a generic tool with our logo on it. The organisation's founding documents are embedded in how it works.

The Kintsugi Pillar

The foundational document for everything built at Kintsugi Heroes: the kintsugi metaphor, the vision and mission, who our heroes are, the four-stage story arc, and the brand values.

The Pillar is committed into this codebase and its machine-readable version travels inside every AI prompt the Studio issues, so no generated output leaves the system without it. Every feature passes the Pillar's build checkpoint before it ships.

Kintsugi Heroes brand guidelines (2024)

The visual and voice identity of Kintsugi Heroes: the gold, lime and green palette, the logo system, typography, and the three key words, genuine, empathetic, hopeful.

The brand guidelines drive the platform directly: the kintsugi palette is built into the interface, each series carries its own tone brief inside every prompt, and the house voice, genuine, empathetic and hopeful, is enforced on all generated copy.

Kintsugi Heroes corporate prospectus (2025)

The organisation's formal statement of who it is: a volunteer-led not-for-profit founded by Ian Westmoreland OAM in 2022, its vision (a world filled with meaningful personal connections), its mission, the themes it explores, and its track record.

The prospectus anchors what this platform is for. Its vision, mission and themes are embedded in the Pillar that frames every output, its theme list shapes the production taxonomy, and the platform's reporting and grant tooling serve the organisation it describes.

KH-TIC-001 (this Standard)

The Trauma-Informed Content and AI Governance Standard: the safety layer every output is generated under and reviewed against.

Represented as data in this platform. Its principles ride inside every generation prompt, every output passes an automated governance check against it, and nothing publishes without a named human review.

The evidence base

Every rule in the Standard traces to one of these recognised frameworks. They are the same sources used by clinicians, the Australian media, and government.

Framework	What it is	Who uses it	How Kintsugi Heroes applies it
SAMHSA's concept of trauma and six principles	The internationally recognised framework for a trauma-informed approach.	Health, community and government services worldwide; the reference point for trauma-informed practice.	The backbone of Section 3: all six principles, adapted for content work.
Mindframe national guidelines (Everymind)	Australian guidelines for safe public communication about suicide, mental ill-health, and alcohol and other drugs.	Australian media, journalists, and stage and screen content creators.	Content-safety rules: warnings, language, framing.
Trauma-informed care, TIP 57	Clinical guidance including retraumatisation and the window of tolerance.	Behavioural health and clinical services.	The distinction between talking about and reliving an experience (3.1).
Voice of Witness trauma-informed storytelling practices	A storytelling-specific ethical framework: consent, dignity, narrator control.	Oral-history and narrative non-fiction practitioners internationally.	Our storytelling-platform commitments: consent and narrator control.

The six principles

The Standard applies SAMHSA's six trauma-informed principles to storytelling. Each one is a concrete, reviewable obligation, not a value statement.

3.1 Safety

Physical and psychological safety comes first (SAMHSA, 2014a).

Content never sensationalises trauma. The hook is the person's strength or insight, never the graphic detail of what happened to them (Everymind, n.d.).
Distressing details are only included when the hero shared them willingly on record and they serve the story's meaning (Everymind, n.d.; SAMHSA, 2014b).
Content warnings are applied consistently where episodes cover suicide, self-harm, abuse, addiction, or violence, with crisis support such as Lifeline 13 11 14 included in show notes for those episodes (Everymind, n.d.; Lifeline Australia, n.d.).
Titles, thumbnails, and Shorts hooks must pass the test: would the hero feel safe seeing this in their own feed? (Kintsugi Heroes policy.)

3.2 Trustworthiness and transparency

Decisions are made with transparency, building and maintaining trust (SAMHSA, 2014a).

Heroes are never quoted out of context. Pull-quotes and clips preserve the meaning the hero intended (Everymind, n.d.; Voice of Witness, n.d.).
Editing choices, what is cut and what is highlighted, never reshape the hero's story into something they did not say (Everymind, n.d.).
Talent Release Forms are confirmed before anything is published, with no exceptions. (Kintsugi Heroes policy.)

3.3 Choice and control

Heroes keep control over their own narrative (SAMHSA, 2014a; Voice of Witness, n.d.).

Heroes can review how their story is framed and request changes before publication (Voice of Witness, n.d.).
A hero can withdraw consent for future promotion of their episode at any time, including after publication, and we honour it (Voice of Witness, n.d.).
We use the language heroes use about themselves: their framing of their identity, diagnosis, or experience, not ours (Everymind, n.d.).

3.4 Collaboration

The people whose stories we tell share power in how they are told (SAMHSA, 2014a).

The hero is the authority on their own story. Production decisions that change framing go back to the hero, not just the team (Voice of Witness, n.d.).

Sensitive themes

Where an episode covers suicide, self-harm, abuse, addiction, violence, grief, a content warning and crisis support (Lifeline 13 11 14) travel with it, and a human reviews the content before it goes anywhere. The platform enforces this; it does not rely on someone remembering.

How AI is used, and governed

Kintsugi Heroes is volunteer-led, and AI helps us produce more than our resources would otherwise allow. That use is governed under Australia's AI Ethics Principles by six operating rules. The short version: AI assists, humans decide.

AI assists, humans decide. No AI-generated content about a hero's story is published without human review against this standard. A human in the loop is mandatory, not optional.
Mandatory review for sensitive themes. Any content touching suicide, self-harm, abuse, addiction, violence, or grief is human-reviewed before it goes anywhere. No exceptions.
AI never invents or alters the hero. AI must not embellish, fabricate, or change a hero's words, experience, diagnosis, or framing. The source of truth is always the hero's own recorded words.
Prompts are part of the standard. Any prompt or system instruction that generates hero content must instruct safe, trauma-informed framing, and is itself reviewed. A safe output starts with a safe prompt.
The reviewer owns the output. Where AI assists, the human who reviews and approves it is accountable for it as if they wrote it themselves.
Transparency by default. The team can see where AI is used across the production workflow. AI use is never hidden.

Independent review

The Standard is fully referenced and currently with an independent trauma specialist psychologist pathway for review and sign-off. Once recorded, the reviewer's name, credentials, date and scope will appear here. Until then we claim only what is true: the Standard is evidence-based and aligned to recognised frameworks, and the clinical review is underway.

Beyond the clinical sign-off, an endorsement pathway with recognised trauma and responsible-AI bodies is underway. Nothing on this page will say "endorsed" before it is.

Kintsugi Heroes is a not-for-profit storytelling platform. Vision: a world filled with meaningful personal connections. If anything you see published by Kintsugi Heroes concerns you, contact the team. Contestability is one of the rules above.