Empowering You to Protect Yourself
We’ve specialized in insuring religious organizations for over 25 years, so we understand the unique risks you face each day. Nothing is more important than ensuring the well-being of those you serve, but creating and maintaining a culture of safety can be challenging without the right tools.
If you become a customer, we can offer some tools for risk management of your ministry. Our library is filled with custom-developed training materials, fact sheets, videos, sample policies and more to provide you with everything you need to build a safe, secure environment for your employees, volunteers, and everyone you support through your ministry. We have a sample list of items below to help you see how we can help you do ministry more effectively. Once you become a customer, we can give you access to the entire site to take advantage of all the benefits for a safe and effective ministry.
If you would like to begin that process today, please give us a call at 1.877.552.2576, and one of our sales team will begin the process of helping you become one of our valued partners.
By adopting these items, your organization may be eligible to have a reduction in your policy premium!
How To Prepare For The Possibility Of Violence
A church is often viewed as a safe haven. Not only by the congregation members, staff and volunteers, but by the community it’s a part of. However, today’s reality proves that shootings and violent outbreaks are more commonplace, and churches aren’t excluded from them. Most recently, the Antioch, Tennessee, church shooting that occurred on Sunday, Sept. 24, demonstrates that violent incidents may occur at any time and churches are vulnerable to such acts. Shocking as it may seem, violent incidents like the one in Tennessee happen several times each year at churches across the country. And while it’s not a pleasant topic to discuss, churches need to prepare themselves in case a violent act does occur. Below are some suggestions on how to make your church and its members less vulnerable.
If you don’t already have one, create a church Safety and Security Team. Designate a point person on security issues to be the security director and define the responsibilities of that position.
Conduct a security assessment to identify your church’s vulnerabilities. Ideally, the assessment would be conducted in conjunction with your local law enforcement agency.
Develop a church security plan with defined roles for all staff, including greeters, ushers and other frontline workers and volunteers.
Preventing Sexual Misconduct
Hopefully, your organization will never have to face the financial and emotional devastation of sexual misconduct. But instead of relying upon hope and trust, there are a number of proactive measures and programs that every organization can implement to help prevent sexual misconduct from occurring and minimize the risks associated with an incident.
Obviously, the effects of sexual misconduct can devastate the victim and the victim’s family. But the damage does not stop there. Just one incident of sexual misconduct can destroy the trust, credibility, and reputation of an organization for years. Adding further pain to an incident of sexual misconduct are the legal costs of a lawsuit, which can ruin an organization financially.
Please continue reading below to find more information related to sexual misconduct and to learn more about effective sexual misconduct prevention procedures.
- Approximately 770,000 incidents of child abuse are reported per year, with 10 percent of those being sexual abuse.
- It is believed that less than 10 percent of sexual abuse cases are ever reported to authorities, so the actual incidence of sexual abuse each year is much greater than reported.
- The most common abusers of children are acquaintances of their victims.
Sexual Misconduct Prevention Procedures – Every organization that works with the public should have an official policy in place to help prevent sexual misconduct before it occurs. The following preventive measures are general guidelines only.
1. Screen employees and volunteers.
2. Establish organizational policies and procedures.
3. Educate staff, children, and parents. 4. Develop the best program for your organization.
4. Once you become one of our customers, we can help you develop a policy that keeps your children and ministry safe.
Call today at 877.552.2576
Keys To A Safe Financial Program
The first step to putting financial safeguards into place is to develop a policy that identifies how money is handled, counted, deposited, reported, and audited. The policy should address procedures for handling funds from the time collections are taken until money is disbursed. Instituting a policy that includes this information will help prevent the misappropriation of funds and ensure that both staff members and volunteers are protected if an accusation is ever made against them. In addition, a financial policy is more likely to deter individuals from embezzling funds because they know that the cash management system is being carefully observed.
Protecting Your Ministry From Lighting Strikes And Surge Damages
Did you know that over 45 percent of all accidental data loss is attributed to power failure or surges? In fact, one of the leading causes of electrical equipment failure, accounting for approximately $28 billion of damage in the United States every year, is transient voltage. Transient Voltage – What You Can’t See Can Hurt You Transient voltage – also known as an electrical surge – is a short surge of electricity or rise in voltage that exceeds safe levels of operation for electrical equipment. Transient voltage can pass through any piece of electrical equipment in just a millisecond.
How Can You Protect Your Equipment From Transient Voltage Damage? Pull the Plug – Having a power outage creates a serious threat to computers and other sensitive electronic equipment. Power restoration can cause an electrical surge of damaging electricity. Whether it’s during or after a storm or power outage, the best way to avoid surge damage is to unplug equipment and turn off switches. Once the threat passes or power is restored, plug the equipment back in one piece at a time.
This is just the start
Once You Become One Of Our Valued Customers, We can give you access To Other Topics We Help Ministries With