As part of your volunteer work, you may interact with families who are facing significant challenges, including serious illness, trauma, grief, or loss. These situations can be emotionally intense and may bring up personal feelings or memories.
Please take care of yourself—it’s okay to take a break, reach out for support, or step back if something feels overwhelming. Your wellbeing is important, and we’re here to support you. There are Child Safety Champions at every Chapter, and every volunteer has access to Sonder.
Child Safety Champions take a lead role in safeguarding children and young people at their Chapter, and they are here to support you. You will find a poster up at the Chapter with the details or they may be wearing an identifying lanyard. And as always, you can ask a staff person for help.
Sonder provides around-the-clock qualified and comprehensive support across safety, medical, and mental health. If you don’t have Sonder, reach out to your RMHC Northern NSW coordinator to arrange access to your Sonder wellbeing app.
Our safeguarding framework is a structure and collection of documents we have in place to ensure we create an environment where children are respected, listened to and protected.
Every team member, volunteer, contractor and Board member follows the safeguarding framework
It is important to refresh our Safeguarding Children and Young People (SCYP) knowledge on a regular basis, so we always know how to keep the children and young people in our programs safe.
Sarah is the name of RMHC’s online training portal. Here are some guides to completing your online training:
