Safe Congregations Task Force
Charge from the Standing Committee
April 10, 2008

Background

WUS is committed to creating, supporting and nurturing a safe and healthy environment to support all that we do together as a congregation. Good intentions alone do not insure that we will consistently achieve this goal. A Safe Congregation is one in which there are healthy boundaries between all members of the community: ministers, staff, members, friends, children and youth.  As our ministry to children and youth continues to expand, and our shared ministry also grows, we seek a clear set of policies and procedures that will guide and govern our relationships with one another and therefore protect us as individuals and as a community. The same guidelines, clearly communicated, understood and safeguarded, will allow us to grow and develop even further in relationship to one another and to the larger world.

In the past several years, there has been more than one effort begun to look at safety in the context of our programs for children and youth. The lack of continuity in our staffing has stalled these efforts, while at the same time a concern has been voiced that some practices put in place to protect children have fallen out of use. Recently, the RE Committee asked the Standing Committee for a statement of policy on background checks for adults volunteers. Our lack of a clear answer guided by written policy and our lack of a broader policy designed to insure the safety of all members of the community led the Standing Committee to recommend a Task Force be charged with examining both where we are and where we wish to be on the path to becoming a Safe Congregation.

Scope of Work

1)      Locate and review existing written policies and any notes or products of earlier work done in the area of child protection policies and relationship boundaries.

2)      Review “The Safe Congregation Handbook” published by the UUA.

3)      Research the practices of other UU congregations who have created Safe Congregations policies and procedures, with an emphasis on child protection policies. Task Force members might interview members of staff at nearby churches or find helpful written policies through UUA or congregational websites.

4)      Interview staff and lay leaders to identify areas of concern around relationship boundaries, confidentiality, or other issues related to physical and emotional safety in the context of the congregation’s work and solicit their recommendations.

Deliverables

1)      Describe, in writing, current practices or policies and comment on their adequacy.

2)      Identify areas for which policies or guidelines should be created, developed, or modified and, when possible, make specific recommendations if the “discovery” phase of the Task Force’s work has yielded good models, ideas and suggestions. Identify questions that need further discussion or exploration before policies or guidelines can be written.

3)      Recommend next steps.

Time Frame

It is the Standing Committee’s intention that the Safe Congregations Task Force will serve for a limited period of time (no more than three months) and will be dissolved after the above tasks and deliverables have been completed. The Standing Committee, in consultation with the Ministers and staff, will act on the Task Force’s recommendations for next steps.