How to Use Safe Kids Thrive
What is Safe Kids Thrive?
Safe Kids Thrive is designed to guide Youth-Serving Organizations (YSOs) through steps recommended by The Massachusetts Legislative Task Force of the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse to help keep children and youth safe from abuse—with a focus on preventing the sexual abuse and exploitation of minors.
Since it is intended for use by YSOs of all sizes, resources, personnel and experience dealing with child abuse prevention, each of our building blocks is explained in detail. With the exception of our general introduction to the concepts of building policies and procedures, each section offers a summary, a set of implementation guidelines, examples, toolkits, sample documents, forms and checklists, and a set of key findings and recommendations.
How to Get Started
There are two ways to browse this website:
Browse without an Account
All of our resources are publicly available and categorized by topic. You can view and filter through all resources in our Prevention Topics archive. Each Prevention Topic overview teaches you about best practices with respect to preventing child sexual abuse:
- Policies and Procedures
- Screening, Hiring and Criminal Background Checks
- Codes of Conduct
- Monitoring Behavior
- Safe Physical Environments and Safe Technology
- Responding and Reporting
- Education and Training (for Adults and Children)
- Sustainability
Create a Free Learning Center Account
By creating a free Learning Center account, you can save resources to your account and Take the Pledge to Prevent Child Sexual Abuse.
Learning about Best Practices
For each Element of Prevention, we include a set of Minimum Required Standards that are based on best practices in child protection, intended to be used by your YSO as a starting point—both to measure your current safety frameworks and/or build new ones. The guidelines also provide practical steps you can take to implement the minimum standards, and to determine if a more comprehensive framework is needed.
Finally, we offer a 3-Step Implementation and Decision Making Model to help YSOs like yours:
- Determine how many of the basic, minimum safety requirements are in place
- Identify the risks, requirements, issues and questions leadership should consider to determine if additional safety elements may be appropriate based on your circumstances, activities and responsibilities
- Decide which additional safety elements beyond the minimum requirements are necessary to augment your existing prevention framework
You can find these best practices under each topic in the Elements of Prevention archive.
We hope that these resources equip your YSO to build greater awareness of the issues of child abuse and neglect among your staff, volunteers, parents, and children and youth; evaluate your current safety protocols; and prioritize your methods and strategies to keep your children safe.
