Robbie Mair — Founder of Sanctuary Infrastructure

My Story

From adversity
to advocacy.

I grew up with a violent, abusive father. The blueprint I was handed — for what a man is, what a home is, what love is — was fear. At seventeen I left, and I was homeless — sleeping in a tent in a park in South Wales. I fell through the system with no safety net, and was taken in by an elderly couple. Informal care, though no one called it that. I was, in every way that mattered, one of the children Sanctuary now exists to help.

Everything after that, I had to teach myself.

How to process trauma instead of passing it on. How to handle money, starting from nothing. How to be a husband and a father who is the opposite of what was modelled to me. How to build a whole life from scratch. There was no one to show me — so I learned it the hard way, alone, over thirty years.

I trained in jujitsu to master my own strength rather than inflict it. I gave thirty years to charity — the Samaritans, Crisis shelters every Christmas, chairing Journeyman UK, founding a support group that still runs today. I spent twenty years as a management consultant and twenty as a landlord. And I built a family that is safe — the achievement I am proudest of.

My son Arun is neurodiverse. Watching the system fail him — and fighting for the right support — showed me, up close, what the right environment does for a child. My wife Popi, a physiotherapist of 22 years, whose clinical insight and unwavering support have shaped Sanctuary from the beginning.

Sanctuary is where all of it converges.
It is not a pivot. It is an arrival.

That arrival comes with a discipline. I create the home — the planning, the consents, the capital, the refurbishment — and then I step back. Thirty years taught me how to help; they also taught me that the care itself belongs to the people trained to give it. Sanctuary exists to carry the weight an operator should never have to hold — the property, the planning risk, the overhead — so they can do the work that actually matters.

I am not here to extract from this sector, and I am not passing through it. Two strangers once did the unglamorous, generous thing for a homeless seventeen-year-old who could give them nothing back.

I intend to keep doing it for as long as I am able.

An operator who works with me is not betting on a developer who discovered care homes were a yield. They are working with someone who was that child.

The start

A violent home

A childhood shaped by fear. The blueprint handed to me was the one I spent my life refusing to pass on.

Age 17

Homeless — then informal care

A tent in a park in South Wales. Taken in by an elderly couple who showed me what a safe home felt like.

Age 19+

Learning to give back

Crisis at 19. The Samaritans. Thirty years of charity that has never stopped.

The rebuild

A life taught to myself

Money, relationships, fatherhood, work — every skill learned alone, the hard way.

Now

Sanctuary

The blueprint — the right one this time — written down for the children who need it.

Robbie Mair in his gi — three black belts in jujitsu

Three black belts. Jujitsu as a discipline of self-mastery — learning to master my own strength rather than inflict it.

The Pathway to Independence

The 23 things
I had to teach myself.

The Pathway to Independence is the programme at the heart of every Sanctuary home. It is not a curriculum I designed at a desk. It is the documented blueprint of how I rebuilt a life from nothing — twenty-three workshops, and every single one is something I had to find out for myself, alone, in the dark. I built the programme so the next child never has to.

Cluster One Personal Growth & Self-Discovery

Discovering Your Purpose — Ikigai

Through Japanese martial arts and decades of personal development, I found the idea of Ikigai — a reason for being, where four things overlap: what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. Mine converged on one point: a therapeutic children's home.

A child in care is never asked their reason for being. This hands them the compass.

Emotional Resilience & Stress Management

At twenty-one I developed an ulcer — childhood trauma surfacing in my body. Told to relax, I realised I did not know how. I taught myself through yoga, breathwork, the Samaritans, and eighteen years of jujitsu — learning to channel fear through the breath rather than be ruled by it.

Regulation taught at fourteen, not learned in a hospital bed at twenty-one.

Building & Maintaining Healthy Relationships

My father modelled fear and control — no template for love. Through the Mankind Project I learned the four archetypes and used them, deliberately, to rebuild how I relate to people. I practised it until my own family could "circle up" — honest, safe, together.

The map a child needs to break the cycle they were born into.

Cluster Two Financial Independence & Literacy

Budgeting & Financial Literacy

I taught myself graphic design on a primitive platform, redesigned minicab cards over a summer for fun, then walked — uninvited — into a firm in Tooting and offered them. They wanted 100,000 cards. That was the day I learned how money is really made: initiative, a skill, and the nerve to knock on the door.

Money is not given. It is created by spotting a need and having the courage to offer something.

Cashflow 101 — Financial Independence Through Games

A book — Rich Dad, Poor Dad — changed how I saw money entirely: the shift from earning money to making money work. I learned the mechanics through Robert Kiyosaki's board game, Cashflow 101. I still play it with my own children.

The single most powerful financial instinct — taught at fourteen, through a game.

Earning & Financial Accountability

I became a six-figure management consultant — but the real lesson was discipline. Earning is not enough; what you do with it is everything. Accountability and patience are what compound a modest start into lasting security.

The discipline that turns a wage into a future.

Cluster Three Practical Life Skills

Cooking & Nutrition

At sixteen, sponsored to play tennis, I worked the kitchen at David Lloyd to make ends meet and taught myself to cook. The ulcer at twenty-one taught me the rest: food is fuel, not just something to fill an empty stomach.

Nutrition as self-respect — taught before the body forces the lesson.

Personal Responsibility & Household Management

It started with renting a single room — paying my own rent and bills for the first time, living by one rule: only work with the money you have. That discipline, practised young, eventually ran a national portfolio of sixteen properties.

The chain of small disciplines — taught early, before the panic of leaving care.

Practical Independence Challenge

My independence challenge was not a simulation. It was homelessness — thrown into survival at seventeen with no preparation and no safety net. I came through it the hardest possible way: alone.

Sanctuary turns the cliff edge into a staircase — a supported rehearsal, with mentoring for life.

Cluster Four Community & Leadership

Boys' or Girls' Circle — Peer Support

I circled up with men at the Mankind Project for four years — learning to hold a safe space, to clear conflict, to speak in "I" statements, to ask whether a behaviour serves the man I want to be. It worked so well I founded my own group — now running over a decade.

The circle that rebuilt me — given to a child at fourteen, not found in adulthood.

Collaborative Community Projects

I was nineteen, still rebuilding my own life, when I first volunteered for Crisis. Within a day they made me a team leader — helping run a site of 1,000 homeless guests and 250 volunteers. Giving to others was where I felt most alive.

The child becomes the one who gives — not only the one who is helped.

Active Listening Skills

The Samaritans taught me that listening is not waiting for your turn to speak. It is active — looking beyond the words to the emotion beneath. Done properly, it can save a life, because some people are being truly heard for the first time.

"People get heard and seen for the first time" — the whole workshop in eight words.

Cluster Five Employability & Career Building

Employment Readiness

I walked into corporate life with no experience — so I reverse-engineered it. The CV formula. The interview formula — there are only about ten questions. The power move of asking more questions than the interviewer. Unemployed to six-figure consultant.

The game of getting hired — taught to a young person with no one to coach them.

Pathways to Employment

Being interview-ready is not enough. Most jobs are secured through people you already know. I learned to align the search with my purpose, leverage networks, build new ones, and get "hotlisted" before the interview even happened.

The hidden mechanism of work — taught to the young person with the smallest network of all.

Microsoft Office Skills

Accredited training in the tools of professional life — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook. Crucially, the young person uses these tools to produce their own Pathway work, so the skill is never abstract. I use them every day to run a life with purpose.

The practical engine of a working life — learned by doing, not by watching.

Cluster Six Entrepreneurship & Business Skills

Entrepreneurship & Digital Earning

Generating income from your own initiative, on modern platforms. We bring in experts on the latest trends — but the foundation is the same instinct I used at the start: see a need, offer something, create value from nothing.

Most care leavers are taught to find a job. This teaches them to build one.

Buying & Selling Businesses

I have bought struggling businesses, turned them around, and sold them — and across a consulting career delivered over £100m of profitability. This workshop hands a young person the principles behind that, taught by someone who has done it.

The idea that you can own and grow something — rarely offered to a child in care.

Property Mastermind

Twenty years as a landlord, building a national portfolio from a single modest start. Property as a route to security — the exact ladder I climbed, taught as instruction rather than left to chance.

A young person who grows up with no assets, given the framework to build them.

Cluster Seven Vocational & Emerging Skills

Construction Trades Learning

Twenty years in property means two decades working alongside skilled tradespeople — carpenters, plumbers, electricians — many now in my circle. They run hands-on workshops, and can open doors to apprenticeships.

A real, employable trade — dignity and a clear future for a young person off the academic path.

Exploring Artificial Intelligence

Not a generic tech class. Each young person's AI workshop is built around their own Ikigai — how this tool can accelerate the specific purpose they identified in the very first workshop.

The newest skill in the programme, tied straight back to the first. The loop closes.

Cluster Eight Values, Integrity & Emotional Growth

Integrity in Work & Agreements

Integrity was not inherited — it was the opposite of what was modelled to me, and I built it deliberately over twenty years through the Trust Formula and the inner archetypes work. Keeping your word builds something. Being reliable is a form of power.

Where a young person decides what kind of adult they are going to be.

Advanced Consulting Skills

Twenty years of consulting, distilled into one approach to any problem: there are over a hundred answers to anything — you just have to ask the right question, work backwards, think abundantly, and be honest.

A problem stops being a wall. It becomes something with a hundred ways through.

Rites of Passage & Mentorship

I have spent decades among hundreds of men and women who walked through trauma and came out grounded — people who know how to name an emotion, ask for help, clear a conflict, circle up, be supported. Recovery is not an event. It is a journey, and no one completes it alone.

The journey does not end at the door of the home. It continues, held by a community, for life.

"Every one of these twenty-three workshops is something I had to learn alone, in the dark. No child in a Sanctuary home will ever have to learn it that way again."

Robbie
Mair

From adversity
to advocacy.

The 23 things
I had to teach myself.

Where it all
leads.

Twenty years
a consultant.

Thirty years.
Still counting.

Let's
talk.

RobbieMair

From adversityto advocacy.

The 23 thingsI had to teach myself.

Where it allleads.

Twenty yearsa consultant.

Thirty years.Still counting.

Let'stalk.

Robbie
Mair

From adversity
to advocacy.

The 23 things
I had to teach myself.

Where it all
leads.

Twenty years
a consultant.

Thirty years.
Still counting.

Let's
talk.