As a department of Brave Foundation, SEED is committed to the principles within the following statement.
The Brave Foundation (Brave) recognises that children rely upon adults to care for and protect them and to provide nurturing and supportive environments to optimise their opportunities for healthy development and that this is enduring into adulthood.
Brave acknowledges its responsibility to protect the rights of children to feel safe and be safe at all times whilst attending its programs. As such Brave has adopted a zero-tolerance policy regarding aggression or violence that threatens the wellbeing of children, other families or staff.
As a child safe organisation, the responsibility for children’s safety and protection is embedded within the organisation culture including governance, and organisational policies and practices. Brave takes a systems approach to the management of risk to ensure the identification of harm, reporting of suspected incidents, and monitoring for any trends for continuous improvement. All allegations of child harm are taken seriously, investigated and reported to the relevant state authority.
Maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of any young person engaged in our programs is paramount to ensuring safety and wellbeing. All records are stored in accordance with the organisations Privacy Policy.
Brave invests in our people through rigorous recruitment practices for all staff and volunteers, and ongoing learning and development, supervision, and monitoring to embed a culture of child safety, particularly the ability to identify and report any concerns of child harm, including cyber-safety. Brave has complaint handling and ‘whistle-blower’ protections as mechanisms to invite and support reporting of concerns of child harm.
Brave is committed to providing environments where children and young people are respected, listened to, and their rights observed. There is a privileging of lived experience voices in the design and delivery of services and embedded in all continuous improvement activities. The organisation has a lived experience advisory group whose wisdom and expertise is privileged in value with other voices.
Brave applies anti-discriminatory practices and recognises the protective factors of culture and community. Brave promotes environments that support connection to culture and community and implements practice approaches that are aimed at strengthening inherent resourcefulness.
Brave will ensure that, as a child safe organisation, it will maintain all expectations of the 10 National Principles for Child Safe Organisations and obligations of state and territory child safe standards.
For further information on our Child Safe Organisation commitment, please contact our Child Safety officer:
Catherine Cooney
Head of Programs, Brave Foundation