MEET SARA

If you are looking at this page, you are probably trying to figure out whether you can trust us with someone you love. That is exactly the right question, and you deserve a real answer.

Sara Mangere started Step Up Supports because she saw how things could go wrong when providers had too many competing interests. She wanted to build something where the only question was: what does this person need, and how do we make sure they get it?

That is still the question, eight years later.

Sara trained as a nurse. She then spent years in business across Asia before coming back to Australia, running businesses and eventually managing another NDIS provider. By the time she took over Step Up in 2020, she had both the clinical background and the business experience to understand what good care actually requires — and what gets in the way of it.

She is also a mother of four. That shapes everything about how she runs this organisation. Every person in a Step Up home is someone’s family. She does not forget that.

Step Up does not offer Support Coordination, Financial Plan Management, or property ownership. It does not send its own SIL clients to its own group programs to generate more revenue. These are deliberate choices.

Sara’s view is simple: providers who have a financial stake in every part of a participant’s life eventually face situations where their interests and the participant’s interests pull in different directions. She did not want to be in that position. So she removed it from the start.

Step Up does one thing. It provides support. And it tries to do that as well as it possibly can.

Sara grew up in a family that was deeply involved in community service. Her parents ran the Melbourne City Mission and then the Ballarat City Mission. Her father led Prison Fellowship for many years, and as part of that work, people coming out of prison were housed on the family property while they got back on their feet.

Sara grew up alongside those people. She learned early that if you look past someone’s history, past their behaviour, past whatever the world had decided about them, you almost always find a person worth knowing.

Her father lost his eye in an accident when he was two years old and has lived with a glass eye his whole life. It was only in recent years that he used the word ‘disability’ to describe it. Sara was genuinely surprised. It had never once occurred to her to think of him that way. She had just seen her dad.

That is the lens she brings to this work. It is the lens she hires for.

In 2024, Sara’s husband Tawanda joined as Chief Operating Officer. He has a strong background in finance and risk, which has given Sara more space to focus on the complex programs and the people in them.

The management team at Step Up is women-led, and Sara is proud of that — not as a talking point, but because she has seen what it produces. She is also committed to building a workplace where women do not have to choose between a career and a family. The team reflects that. Flexibility and family are built into how Step Up operates, not bolted on as an afterthought.

Step Up has a full management structure, with department heads and a dedicated client and staff manager overseeing day-to-day operations. But the Complex Client team — the SIL Complex Case Managers working with the highest-need participants — reports directly to Sara. Sara stays personally across this group because she understands exactly how much is riding on getting it right for the people in it.