Something I’m hearing a lot of lately is around why we should integrate more young people into Mozilla as volunteers, and how we can facilitate that.
We already have young people at Mozilla, and as demonstrated by this very site that you’re using (created mostly by people who started at Mozilla in their early teens), they can be highly effective. We should definetely facilitate that.
A major concern I have here is safeguarding. As an organisation, if we want to facilitate young people, we should lay out some basic safeguarding, and general guidance for working with young people. The reason behind this being that it’s just the right thing to do, and we could potentially face legal penalities if we don’t.
Here’s some things I’m interested in doing/taking lead on:
- Developing a safeguarding policy for Mozilla
- Identifying functional team leaders that can act as youth facilitators, who would be trained in basic safeguarding, and be able to support and work with our young people
- Working with the “Youth Mozilla” initiative on building tracks for their young people to work with the wider Mozilla
- Take on the role of safeguarding/youth participation lead
If we look more closely at what exactly our safeguarding strategy would look like, under my current ideas
- Basic guidelines for working with young people published
- A team of youth facilitators developed to support our young people, with safeguarding training. These people would be trusted points of call
- Criminal Record Checks for people who have a key function that involves working with young people that volunteer with us (and we should probably look at this for webmaker too!)
- A trained safeguarding officer (me?) to proactively train members of staff, answer concerns, and deal with any issues that arise with young people
And this is what I need to do it
- Funding to take a safeguarding course. Not cheap, but way cheaper than hiring a consultant. This can come after I’ve developed a draft plan, but before we put everything into implementation
- Support from the participation team in approving/pushing out guidelines
- Support from legal on ensuring we don’t break laws anywhere
- Approval from somebody to say “yes! go do it!”
This is pretty vauge. But I’m interesting in hearing people’s thoughts.