Bridging the Safeguarding Gap in the U.S. Nonprofit Sector

Open-access frameworks equipping U.S. nonprofits to operationalize their duty of care.

Safeguarding is an organization’s duty to make sure the people it serves are never harmed by its own staff, volunteers, or anyone acting in its name. The United Nations and international aid agencies spent two decades putting this into practice through a complete safeguarding standard. In the United States, this protection is scattered across separate laws, each covering a single setting or group: residents of nursing homes, children in schools, employees in the workplace. In the absence of a unified standard, organizations are expected to fill the space themselves. But the absence of a standard is not an absence of risk: harm is possible in any organization, and when it occurs, everything the organization has built — its funding, its reputation, its mission — is on the line.

This initiative compared the international standard with U.S. law and mapped exactly where the fragments end and the gaps begin. The result is a set of open-access tools — a policy template, a self-assessment, and training materials — built to fill those gaps and free for any organization to adopt.