Your Framework for Sustainability

Because child safety and abuse prevention frameworks rely so heavily on influencing staff and volunteer attitudes and behaviors, your leadership plays a critical role in introducing, managing, and monitoring the implementation of your programs. You’ll need consistent involvement and collaborative, ongoing communication with all stakeholders— throughout and beyond your initial stages of implementation. 

Systemic organizational change requires leadership to make the case for why a change is important—and provide mechanisms enabling the change and its assessment. Your leadership must then hold itself, all management, and all employees accountable to “be” the desired change in all their attitudes and actions. An important element for sustaining forward momentum in child abuse prevention initiatives is communication about how the effort is evolving, and feedback from leadership reflecting its ongoing commitment to the process. 

Finally, no matter how small or large your youth-serving organization (YSO) is, creating a sustainable safety solution requires periodically asking questions about what is working in your child abuse prevention efforts, what isn’t working, and what needs improvement. And those answers require data. While there are many types of data that can be collected for analysis and review, Safe Kids Thrive provides you with key data collection strategies and tools: a Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Evaluation Tool, a Sample Self-Audit Form for YSOs, and a Sample Incident Report. 

You can help to sustain positive outcomes by scheduling annual “self-audits” that collect data to measure forward progress and provide snapshots of your program implementation. These annual snapshots can, in turn, be used to provide ongoing feedback to staff, volunteers, parents, and all other interested parties. In addition, your Policies and Procedures themselves should be evaluated every 2-3 years to ensure they are up-to-date and reflect your organization’s current programs.

Finally, community partnerships offer vital resources to support your efforts to build robust, sustainable child abuse prevention programs. These and other collaborative efforts are essential for building relationships, sharing expertise, accessing services and training opportunities, and building legitimacy and advocacy in the communities you serve.