It is with great sadness that we announce that Sarah Anderson, Founder and Trustee of The Listening Place, died from cancer at the age of 69 on Sunday 7 December 2025.
Sarah founded The Listening Place in 2016 and ran the charity as Chief Executive Officer until July 2025, when her illness forced her to step back from frontline duties. Prior to that, she spent 37 years with Central London Samaritans, three of them as branch director.
It is impossible to overstate Sarah’s contribution to The Listening Place. Our model of support is built on her convictions: that face-to-face conversations are hugely therapeutic for people who are feeling suicidal, that effective support can be non-clinical and delivered by volunteers, and that complete confidentiality is crucial in helping people to speak frankly about their suicidal thoughts and plans.
Together with a handful of other volunteers, Sarah started setting up The Listening Place from scratch ten years ago. She consulted with experts to help structure the support the new organisation would offer, negotiated space at the offices of Wandsworth & Westminster Mind on Vauxhall Bridge Road and began building relationships with potential referral partners in the NHS. In June 2016, The Listening Place received its first referral, from King’s College Hospital. Eighteen months later, 1,000 people had been referred and the charity was open seven days a week to keep up with demand. Today, The Listening Place operates four sites across London and has the capacity to support 10,000 people every year. All of this is testament to Sarah’s vision and tenacity, her wonderful warmth and her ability to galvanise and engage all sorts of people, from doctors to donors.
Sarah’s commitment to The Listening Place was absolute. For the first few years of the organisation’s life, she made every first referral call and every check-in call to a high-risk visitor, conducted assessments and coordinated all ongoing appointments and assessments. She was always on call and she checked every single appointment report. She was passionate about ensuring that the volunteer recruitment and training process was robust and thorough; for many years, she checked every single volunteer application personally and attended every single information evening (the first step in the application process).
Even after her health began to falter, Sarah was a regular presence on shift at Meade Mews in Pimlico, where her immense compassion for both visitors and volunteers, her sense of humour, and her great facility for always knowing exactly the right thing to say to someone in distress or difficulty, were invaluable.
Last Friday, in recognition of her extraordinary work, Sarah was visited by His Majesty The King at Royal Trinity Hospice in Clapham, where he personally invested her as a Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE). Prime Minister Keir Starmer then wrote individually to Sarah to commend her for her “sustained and dedicated sense of public service”.
At The Listening Place, each volunteer has a unique number, assigned when they graduate from training. Dame Sarah Anderson DBE was ‘Sarah 1’ and that’s how she was always referred to around TLP, with great fondness. She wasn’t just our first volunteer; she was the origin of The Listening Place and of its single, vital mission: ensuring that people with suicidal thoughts don’t have to suffer alone. She was also a huge part of the sense of togetherness and unity that our volunteers and staff feel on shift and around our offices. She was Sarah 1 in every sense, and she will be deeply missed.
