As a charity or foundation, you must make sure you’re doing all you can to keep people safe. As a grant maker, no matter what size of the grants, you must also make sure the people you give grants to are doing all they can to keep people safe.
The Charity Commission requires that you:
If you’re starting on safeguarding from scratch, use this guide alongside other advice such as the pages in steps to a safer organisation.
Your staff who deal with grants may have varying responsibilities that need to be considered as you decide what level of recruitment checks, training and support they need.
Things that must be in place:
Sometimes, when people have a safeguarding concern about an organisation, they will want to tell the people who fund it, rather than the organisation itself.
You must make sure that whoever deals with complaints looks out for when someone is whistleblowing about a safeguarding issue in one of your grant organisations.
You also need to make sure you have a whistleblowing policy in case your staff or volunteers feel like their safeguarding concerns are not being listened to.
Your safeguarding policy and procedures must identify who in your organisation is the designated safeguarding lead. They will oversee all the usual procedures for raising safeguarding concerns within the organisation. You must make sure that there is a specific procedure for making decisions about safeguarding concerns that relate to grant applicants and grant holders.
When you are creating that section of your procedures, there are some key questions you should ask yourself:
Like in any organisation, you must take care to make sure you meet rules about data protection and data sharing under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). One specific area that grant makers need to think about is sharing case studies, images and quotes from either grant recipients or the people they work with.
You must make it clear to all your grant holders that safeguarding responsibilities override data protection and privacy rules. In your grant agreement, make it clear that you must be given information when:
If you want to know more about data protection and sharing within safeguarding, use storing and sharing information from our guide for designated safeguarding leads.
If you want to know more about collecting case studies safely, see our guide for communication and marketing managers for further details.
Make sure you’ve considered how safeguarding could affect how you invest your assets and raise money. Trustees have a duty to get the best return on their investments. However, they must make sure their choice of investment doesn’t harm those they seek to help and isn’t connected to activities which are criminal or unethical.
You should:
Where you are providing co-funding with another organisation, make sure you’ve put arrangements in place for how you will share relevant information with each other. For example, this could be serious safeguarding concerns or information relating to investigations.
Want to know more? Our guide to working with partners gives ideas for making shared safeguarding arrangements.
Last reviewed: 18 June 2021
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