Safe Environment Strategies: Visibility
Safe Environment Strategies: Visibility Whether or not you can control the design of your space, physical safety depends on your ability to…
Home / Monitoring Behavior / Promoting a Culture of Safety
Protocols should be developed in order to inform staff and volunteers about supervision, communication, and reporting procedures at your Youth-Serving Organization (YSO). Leadership should invest time in promoting the culture of child safety using Monitoring Behaviors.
To foster a culture of safety:
Encourage staff to view safety as a priority and mutual responsibility, encourage questions, establish ongoing communication, and provide support to build trust. Highlight the importance of staff and volunteers in supporting, building, and maintaining a community grounded on your organization’s mission of safety. Utilize supervision and staff meetings to communicate and clarify a consistent message that protecting children is everyone’s responsibility.
Provide positive feedback when observing expected and appropriate behaviors. Reinforce appropriate behaviors with praise, providing staff and volunteers with recognition for positive conduct. Utilize feedback to highlight instances of staff and volunteers’ positive interactions with children.
Ensure leadership is present, models appropriate behavior, supports positive interactions, and intervenes when needed. Leadership should illustrate the expected behaviors your organization would like staff and volunteers to exhibit. Leadership should also use supervision and direction in instances where intervention is necessary.
Conduct annual surveys and audits to gather information from staff, volunteers, children, and parents including questions about boundaries and appropriate behaviors. Regularly ask for feedback from all stakeholders involved in your organization in order to understand their perspectives on how the guidelines, policies, and rules about expected and prohibited behaviors are being implemented. Encourage communication with staff and families regarding the specific needs of those at your organization.
Equip parents with information about your child sexual abuse prevention plans. Share your organization’s plan for child safety with the families involved in your organization. Maintain open communication with families about your commitment to safety and solicit their feedback.
Apply your Monitoring Behavior protocol to your YSO by encouraging open communication and feedback between leadership, staff, and volunteers. Involve families, staff, and volunteers in conversations about behaviors, policy development, and child safety.
Safe Environments
Safe Environment Strategies: Visibility Whether or not you can control the design of your space, physical safety depends on your ability to…
Code of Conduct
Your Code of Conduct will be unique to your organization, based on your size, purpose, location, staffing, ages served, additional vulnerabilities…
Screening & Hiring
When possible, it can be informative to observe an applicant in your environment with the child(ren) and youth you serve, to look for potential red…
Training
Ideally, all children/youth should receive training and education on issues of personal safety and abuse prevention. However, not every organization…
Policies & Procedures
Your Policies and Procedures must be continuously referred to throughout the year. At a minimum, an annual review of all policies and procedures…
Sustainability
Long-term organizational change is a process of continuous review, evaluation, and communication. It includes regularly examining what is working…
Safe Environments
Physically safe spaces, with proper supervision, are required to maintain safety standards at your Youth-Serving Organization (YSO). Ensure policies…
Policies & Procedures
Policies for youth-serving organizations in Massachusetts should clearly identify the duties and responsibilities of all staff, reflect both Federal…
Code of Conduct
Once your Code of Conduct is in place, it’s important to implement it through training and by disseminating the information widely, in a variety…
Training
The approaches in the chart below can provide frameworks that make your organization most effective when training adults and/or children/youth….
Customized child sexual abuse prevention guidelines to meet the unique needs of any organization that serves children.
Safe Kids Thrive is managed by the Children's Trust of Massachusetts
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