Four Tools to Jump Start Your Annual Security Review
It’s the time of year when organizations focused on children and youth begin to evaluate their safety and security policies; Which opens the door for identifying opportunities to improve safety, confirm what’s working and what’s not, and make any needed improvements.
Whether you’re updating or creating a child protection policy, opening lines of communication, or identifying a need to share the workload to improve safety, here are four tools to help you get things done.
- Child Safeguarding Committee – Protecting children is a big job and to properly do it, you must enlist the help of others. A Child Safeguarding Committee seeks to create a safe environment for children by developing a set of working principles that eliminate the grey area when interacting with children.
- Annual Child Safety Survey – Is a short 5-10-minute survey designed to gain feedback from parents and children on how the organization is doing regarding child safety. The key to this survey is including a section just for kids. Kids love to share their observations, feedback, and experiences. By giving children a voice, you will open lines of communication, encourage transparency, and build trust.
- Security Team Partnership – Security teams are a fast-growing resource for child and youth-centered organizations. For many working with a team or building one from scratch seems too far out of scope, especially if you know nothing about security. This tool provides six things you can do to start the conversation and gain momentum for building a team.
- Child Protection Policy – Is a set of working guidelines that establish how an organization intends to protect and care for children. It ensures that anyone interacting with children has been screened and undergone a thorough background investigation. It also offers a layer of protection for staff, volunteers, and adults in the scenario of false accusations. This tool includes a set of three posts that discuss the purpose, creation, and implementation of a Child Protection Policy.
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Photo credit: Nathan Laytka
