Standing Tall in Hamilton Inc. (STiH) is committed to ensuring the safety of every child in our Program and ensure our compliance with Victoria’s new Child Safe Standards that come into effect on 1 July 2022.

To assist our team in maintaining and strengthening our child safe culture, we have signed up with ChildSafe Australia, a Children’s Harm Prevention Charity that provides practical tools and training to help community organisations transition from policy to good practice. ChildSafe Australia is working with our team to improve our well-being and safety outcomes.

We believe that the youth in our program deserve our absolute best efforts to ensure their safety, and we know this involves more than good intentions or the assumption that harmful incidents will not occur. Like all organisation that work with children, we are all under increased scrutiny in relation to screening workers and volunteers, managing all risks, and improving the quality of care that we offer.

ChildSafe Australia provides us with the tools to ensure that our policies are translated into good practice and allow us to have effective risk management processes to minimise incidents. We will work together to ensure we meet and exceed our responsibilities and obligations under the National Child Safe Principles and new Victorian Child Safe Standards to keep our youth safe.

Our team, including all our current and new volunteer mentors, will undertake updated training to improve awareness and practice to ensure ongoing compliance with Child Safe Standards.

STiH Chairperson Robert Vecchiet says, “making the decision to sign up to ChildSafe Australia was easy for our team. We were looking for a program that would ensure our staff and volunteers would be able to meet and exceed the standards and requirements to ensure our organisation would always be compliant with Child Safe Standards. We also wanted a package that offered an online platform that was flexible and easy to use, was able to store our policies and information securely, and allowed our team to roll out the training to all our volunteers in a timely manner. We cannot compromise on the safety of the youth in our program, and we need to ensure that everyone that works or volunteers with us is aware of their obligations under the updated Victorian Child Safe Standards.

The training package will be extremely beneficial for our committee, our staff, and our volunteers, as it will allow everyone to understand the reasons behind the policies and processes that we have implemented.

The safety of our youth is a priority, and by signing up to ChildSafe Australia, reviewing our policies and undertaking updated training, our organisation is holding itself accountable and doing everything we can to provide a safe and trusted environment for every student in our Program. We are proud to partner with ChildSafe Australia.”

For more information on ChildSafe, visit www.childsafe.org.au