Any organization that involves volunteers needs to have safety policies and procedures to protect both volunteers and those that they serve, and if the volunteers interact with vulnerable people or could be in one-to-one situations with ANYONE, there needs to be even more extensive safety policies and procedures.

What do safety policies look like?

Screening steps for volunteers could be the volunteer applicants:

• providing real names (not just nicknames or screen names), residential addresses (not just a PO Box), phone number, etc.
• providing the name of the volunteer’s current employer and previous two employers, or the name of where they are currently enrolled in school and how many hours they are taking.
• answering the questions “why do you want to volunteer?” and “What do you hope to experience as a volunteer” and “tell me about a time you interacted with a person in crisis.”
• providing professional and academic reference checks (employers, teachers)
• providing personal reference checks (friends, family)
• undergoing a criminal background check
• undergoing a credit check
• being in a probation period and extra observation at first
• going through required training

Supervision for volunteers could be:

• Volunteers required to use an email the organization has set up and know that ALL emails are archived and could be reviewed at any time.
• Volunteers required to work in pairs or paired with a staff person.
• Staff that created the volunteering role meeting with the volunteer once a month or once a quarter AND meeting with other volunteers and clients about that volunteer’s performance.

Policies for volunteers could be:

• Never being alone, one-on-one, with another volunteer, a paid staff person or a client.
• Never using any electronic communications avenues other than a specific email or online platform (no texting among volunteers, for instance).
• A prohibition on a volunteer giving personal contact info to any client.
• A mandatory reporting by the volunteer if a client gives that volunteer personal contact info or tries to contact that volunteer outside of agreed-to communications avenues (WhatsApp, TikTok, etc.)
• Mandatory reporting to management of suspicions of inappropriate behavior relating to sex by volunteers and clients.

etc.

Again, these are just EXAMPLES. And what safety requirements a volunteer beach cleanup group is going to have is NOT going to be the same as what a mentoring program for young people will have.

But whatever you have at your organization, whatever you require, should be detailed on your organization’s web site – NO EXCEPTIONS. And if they are not, it has to be assumed you don’t have them. And if you are recruiting volunteers to work with vulnerable groups or one-on-one with anyone, your post is going to be deleted here unless you have info on your web site on the steps you employ to keep volunteers and those they were safe.

Safety in Service Delivery/Client Support by Online Volunteers.

Your right to turn away volunteers who won’t adhere to safety measures (& your right to refuse to volunteer at an unsafe program)

My wakeup call regarding risks in volunteering programs – a blog that may change your mind about how to think about risks in volunteer engagement programs

Letting Fear Prevent Volunteer Involvement is Too Risky” (a guest blog by me for Energize, Inc. and Susan Ellis)

Have you enabled a Larry Nassar?

Keeping volunteers safe – & keeping everyone safe with volunteers (includes a list of my favorite resources regarding safety in programs that involve volunteers and/or children; I consider many of these resources mandatory reading for managers of volunteers

• Safety in virtual volunteering
• Supervising online volunteers in court-ordered settings
• volunteer managers: you are NOT psychic!
• Your organization is NOT immune to sexual harassment
• Creating a Speak-up Culture in the Workplace
• Why don’t they tell? Would they at your org?
• With volunteers, see no evil?
• All of my blogs and resources related to safety in volunteer engagement.

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site or my YouTube videos and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.