View all Best Practices

Select A Best Practice to View:

  • 1. Form a Child Safety Committee
  • 2. Create Opportunities for Community Dialogue
  • 3. Screen Employees and Volunteers
  • 4. Assess your Space
  • 5. Implement Guidelines for Interacting with Youth
  • 6. Train Adults
  • 7. Support Victim-Survivors
  • 8. Develop Protocols for Responding
  • 9. Empower Youth
  • 10. Maintain & Evaluate your Child Safety Program

Assess your Space

וְיָשַׁב עַמִּי בִּנְוֵה שָׁלוֹם וּבְמִשְׁכְּנוֹת מִבְטַחִים וּבִמְנוּחֹת שַׁאֲנַנּוֹת

My people will abide in a peaceful habitation, in secure dwellings, and in quiet resting places. (Isaiah 32:18)

Why Assess your Space?

Best Practice 4: Assess your Space is about evaluating the safety of your physical and virtual site’s design and access to each space in your facility and virtual programming. There are two basic ways that your institution can decrease risk in vulnerable areas: by careful design of physical and virtual spaces and by utilizing supervision. Your organization should aim for all activities to be conducted in a space that is visible and interruptible. This Best Practice will describe how to run a site assessment and provide you with suggestions for improving the safety of your spaces so that our organizations will be partners in Isaiah’s promise of a Jewish people abiding “in a peaceful habitation, in secure dwellings, and in quiet resting places.”

Assessing your Space Includes the Following Steps:

  • Goal

    1

    Root your Work in Jewish Text
  • Goal

    2

    Assess your Physical and Virtual Space

Tools to Guide You in Implementation:

  •  
    Pre-Practice Survey: Best Practice 4
    Survey
  •  
    Jewish Text Study: Safety and the Creation of Sacred Spaces: Ancient Models and Contemporary Takeaways
    Guide
  •  
    Guide: Introduction to Core Assessment Principles
    Guide
  •  
    Guide: High-Risk Spaces
    Guide
  •  
    Video: Virtual Safeguards Training
    Video
  •  
    Handout: Virtual Safeguards Training
    Handout
  •  
    Guide: Protocols for Safeguarding Children and Teens in Online Communications
    Guide
  •  
    Post-Practice Survey
    Survey

Join the Campaign Today.

By joining the Aleinu campaign you will receive access to our do-it-yourself toolkit containing resources for adopting and implementing best practices to ensure the safety of children in your care. Your YSO will join other organizations all working to implement two or more best practices each year over the next five years.

Join Now