Maintain & Evaluate your Child Safety Program

Now that your child safety program, including Aleinu’s ten Best Practices, is developed and implemented, we look towards the future. To remain vigilant, your organization will need to review it annually to remain current with best practice standards in child protection, evaluate your organization’s compliance, and ensure that your program reflects the reality on the ground. Programs that seemed crystal clear during the development stage may actually be ambiguous in practice, well-intentioned new guidelines may introduce their own unanticipated risks, and certain gold standards may simply be too onerous to observe. Remember that no child safety program is perfect. In fact, regularly reviewing your program, listening to feedback, and revising makes it stronger. Having a child protection program that is tailored to your organization’s context and embraced by the community creates a culture of protection that is far stronger than any one protocol or plan.

Best Practice 10: Maintain and Evaluate Your Child Safety Program outlines the steps for an annual review of your child safety program, including an annual Committee review, solicitation of child and parent feedback, external review of your organization’s policies and procedures by a child protection professional, and a report summarizing these evaluations and any recommended revisions for presentation to your organization’s stakeholders. This report helps gauge the level of child safety in your organization so that the Committee and community as a whole can track the organization’s progress from year to year. Sharing this information with the community helps to build a culture of transparency and accountability, and generates support for the Committee’s efforts towards continuous improvement.

This Best Practice includes the following resources: a worksheet for structuring the annual review and report; checklists for the Committee’s annual review; questionnaires soliciting feedback from parents and children on the state of child safety in your organization; sample evaluation forms; policy language; and email templates for soliciting participation in the review.

We know that it is “Aleinu” — our duty — to carry on the work of previous generations and pave the pathways for those to come. By regularly reviewing what we’ve done and maintaining a level of vigilance around safeguarding our children, we work to ensure that what we’ve planted, they will see to fruition.