SAFEGUARDING FOR CHARITIES
How will HL Safeguarding improve your charity’s approach to safeguarding and better protect you against the risk of abuse?
While charities vary in terms of their size, aims and activities and the political, economic, sociocultural, technological, legal, and environmental forces at play in the regions in which they operate, every UK-based and international charity has one thing in common.
They have sworn to protect those they have been set up to serve from sexual harassment, exploitation, and abuse.
As this duty of care is fundamental to operating as a charity, you must make your safeguarding responsibilities a priority and take every possible step to protect your beneficiaries, your staff, your volunteers, and anyone else who comes into contact with your charity and those representing your charity.As a charity, it is the question of who is representing your charity on the ground that is all too often at the centre of allegations of abusive or exploitative behaviour.
However, with so much to manage as you look to improve the situations of your beneficiaries, how can you make sure you have the processes in place to recruit and deploy the right people and to manage and monitor their performance once they arrive?
This is exactly the support HL Safeguarding has been created to provide for charities.
HOW CAN WE HELP YOUR CHARITY FULFIL ITS SAFEGUARDING RESPONSIBILITIES?
Depending on your charity’s aims and objectives our hugely experienced safeguarding consultants will help you:
- Conduct rigorous risk assessments to ensure you have the appropriate policies and procedures in place for your trustees, volunteers, and local contractors to follow.
- Help you identify and implement the improvements you need to make to your safeguarding protocols to mitigate any potential risks.
- Strengthen your recruitment, management, and training policies to make sure your representatives are suitable for their positions and supervised effectively once in place.
- Ensure you handle any concerns in a full and open manner and have a clear reporting system in place should any concerns need to be officially reported, responded to, or investigated.
- Create a set of checks to make sure risks and safeguarding policies are regularly reviewed and any potential issues are addressed.
- Provide you with a safeguarding framework you can use to respond to reports or accusations of abuse, exploitation, or neglect.
- Manage the necessary legal response to any criminal or civil action that has arisen because of a breach of safeguarding policy or an allegation of abuse, exploitation, or neglect.
- Help you to manage and respond to any adverse press coverage or attention from the relevant local authorities and/or Charity Commission of England and Wales.
- Ensure the victims, their families and their local community have a clear path to the justice and accountability they deserve, safe from intimidation and administrative or procedural delays.
HL Safeguarding 