What is Screening and Hiring?
Finding staff and volunteers you can trust to work with children includes additional steps beyond interviewing and checking references. …
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To protect the children/youth you serve, your organization needs a comprehensive framework: a set of abuse prevention policies and procedures, enhanced screening and hiring practices, safe physical environment and safe technology standards, codes of conduct, and reporting requirements. But implementing these safety elements and announcing that they are in effect isn’t enough. That is why Safe Kids Thrive recommends that you also provide some form of initial and periodic follow-up training on your prevention strategies for staff and volunteers (and possibly children/youth) at all levels.
To help you get started, we’ve created best practice guidelines so your leadership can think about the elements of effective workplace training programs, and how to adapt and integrate training programs into your environment, culture, and circumstances.
Here’s a set of minimum required safety standards that your organization should consider when thinking about training your staff and volunteers:
When selecting or designing a training program, it’s important to build or to look for products that reflect good teaching and learning practices, and offer participatory, interactive problem-based learning experiences that actively engage the learner. Effective programs present information from a positive viewpoint, encouraging healthy behavior rather than forbidding poor behavior, help participants to feel responsible for dealing with the problem, and teach and encourage intervention behaviors. They sometimes even use role-playing to help trainees find comfortable and appropriate ways to express their discomfort with another’s behavior, or to come forward and report suspected child maltreatment.
Whether your organization is large or small, one of the best ways to get started is to seek out and consult with local area social service providers like the Department of Children and Families, the regional Child Advocacy Centers, the Children’s Trust, the Office of the Child Advocate and others included in our Resources. These agencies and others can provide a wealth of local expertise about training options, informational materials, and curricula that have demonstrated effectiveness—and can help save a lot of time as you formulate a training strategy that’s right for your organization.
Screening & Hiring
Finding staff and volunteers you can trust to work with children includes additional steps beyond interviewing and checking references. …
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…
Code of Conduct
Your Code of Conduct will be unique to your organization, based on your size, purpose, location, staffing, ages served, additional vulnerabilities…
Training
Parents and other caregivers need to receive, at a minimum, the same level of prevention education as their child/youth. Parents can be strong…
Safe Environments
How is Your Facility Designed to Keep Children Safe? Child development and school-age programs operate in many different types of facilities….
Sustainability
Long-term organizational change is a process of continuous review, evaluation, and communication. It includes regularly examining what is working…
Sustainability
Community interaction and involvement is important in maintaining a culture of safety surrounding your Youth-Serving Organization (YSO). In order to…
Screening & Hiring
Additional screening and hiring measures should be implemented based on the specific needs, responsibilities, and risks of your Youth-Serving…
Policies & Procedures
Policies and Procedures are an essential backbone of your prevention strategy at your Youth-Serving Organization (YSO), providing an overarching…
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.
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