FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Lauren Nace
LNace@CHILDUSA.org
215-539-1906
11/19/2024
Philadelphia, PA – CHILD USA and Scouting America are proud to announce their partnership to advance child protection by implementing CHILD USA’s Gold Standard Diagnostic Tool and Assessment. This groundbreaking, evidence-derived tool is designed to foster a culture of safety in youth-serving organizations by guiding systemic change across eight critical policy domains. It also educates members of the organization on the policies needed to protect children from CSA effectively.
Scouting America’s adoption of this tool underscores their ongoing commitment to child safety, ensuring their policies and practices meet the highest standards for preventing child sexual abuse.
“This partnership marks a pivotal moment in the fight to protect children in youth organizations from child sex abuse, which is a scourge across the United States and the world,” said Marci Hamilton, CEO and Founder of CHILD USA. “CHILD USA’s social scientists have spent years developing and refining the Gold Standard tool, which makes the assessment of CSA prevention programs more efficient and straightforward. By adopting our Gold Standard, Scouting America continues to take proactive steps to ensure the safety and well-being of every child in their programs.”
The Gold Standard Diagnostic Tool assesses and enhances organizational policies, focusing on critical areas like mandatory reporting, screening and hiring practices, abuse prevention training, and response procedures. It provides a roadmap for youth-serving organizations to implement meaningful changes that prioritize children’s safety. It’s all about meaningful systemic change.
According to Glen Pounder, Chief Safeguarding Officer at Scouting America, “As an organization, Scouting America is dedicated to becoming a leader in safeguarding youth, inside and outside of Scouting. We are impressed with CHILD USA’s Gold Standard not only because of its efficiency, but also what we have been able to learn from it. We would recommend this for any youth-serving organization dedicated to effective and comprehensive child sex abuse prevention.”
With this partnership, CHILD USA and Scouting America are setting a new precedent for how organizations can work together to protect children and prevent abuse.
For more information, please visit www.childusa.org or contact LNace@childusa.org.
About CHILD USA
CHILD USA is a leading nonprofit think tank fighting for children’s rights. Through research, advocacy,
and partnerships, CHILD USA is transforming the fabric of youth-serving organizational systems to
ensure justice for survivors and protect children’s rights to be free from abuse and to secure rights to
education and healthcare. We believe that children should have a right to an open future so that they can
be happy and safe.
About Scouting America
Scouting America provides the nation’s foremost youth program of character development and values-
based leadership training, which helps young people be “Prepared. For Life.®”
Scouting America welcomes all of America’s youth into its programs. Our goal is to give them fantastic
experiences in the outdoors, and elsewhere, where they can grow with us in a safe environment. More
than 130 million Americans have been through our programs since our founding, and currently more than
1 million youth are served by 477,000 dedicated adult volunteers in local councils throughout the country.
To learn more about Scouting America’s mission, visit Scouting.org.