Sarah Gardner

Sarah Gardner is the Founder and CEO of the Heat Initiative, where she leads a high-impact campaign to hold Big Tech accountable for enabling and profiting from child sexual abuse. Since launch, Heat has driven concrete changes, prompting Apple to expand its safety features and keeping the issue of online child sexual exploitation in the headlines. Sarah has mobilized allies to confront tech executives directly and ensured survivor voices are central, supporting legal action and amplifying their stories across 100+ media outlets including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Good Morning America. Prior to founding Heat, Sarah spent a decade at Thorn, where she was instrumental in scaling the organization from a small startup to a multi-million-dollar nonprofit and securing a $63M TED Audacious Prize to support a bold plan to eliminate child sexual abuse material from the internet. She began her career at Free the Slaves.