In April, the province of Alberta, along with Volunteer Alberta, announced a new initiative: a three-year pilot program to cover the costs of police information checks (PICs) for eligible volunteers in nonprofit and voluntary sector organizations.

The subject of volunteer screening is an important one, specifically for organizations that cater to clients at risk or in vulnerable populations. This new Alberta program marks what could be a future template for certain sector organizations that make use of volunteers in sensitive situations.

CharityVillage spoke with Karen Lynch, executive director of Volunteer Alberta, who gave us the background on how this program came to be and what it might do to revolutionize the sector.

Knowledge is power…and security

Lynch recalls that in January 2006 the Alberta Association of Chiefs of Police announced there would be charges forthcoming for police checks on volunteers for nonprofits who required this service. At the time, the cities of Edmonton and Calgary announced they would begin doing this. The charge was between $5 and $15.

“So the problem was that [nonprofits] now had the following responses: Where is the money going to come from? Many volunteer nonprofits began talking about this, and those who did not actually do police information checks as part of their volunteer screening – or worse, didn’t do any volunteer screening – then leapt to the conclusion that to do a proper volunteer screening, you had to have police information checks (PICS),” she explains. “It created the perfect storm for people to want PICS. What Volunteer Alberta heard was the concern about the cost. Further, as a public policy impact, nobody had thought about what this was going to do to organizations trying to engage more volunteers.”

Volunteer Alberta then conducted an “exhaustive’ survey, Lynch says. Her organization discovered there were nonprofits who’d decided not to do PICS because they couldn’t afford it, and still others who tried to find the budget out of their other program services. Lastly, some decided to ask prospective volunteers to pay for it themselves. The latter, she says, “went over like a lead balloon.”

Some organizations decided that if they had to do it, they’d go through a private service, because they could do it in a timelier manner. In the end, there were two concerns for Alberta nonprofits: the cost of the PICS and the information turnaround lag for the screens.

The political winds of change

In the spring of 2008, when Alberta saw a change in premiers – Conservative Premier Ed Stelmach was elected on a platform of promoting “safe and healthy communities,” Lynch says – Volunteer Alberta noted that the new government had budgeted funding for volunteer PICs for organizations whose volunteers worked with vulnerable populations, and that there would be no cost to those organizations.

Since Volunteer Alberta had fought for this since 2006, it was picked to administer this new program. Lynch calls the program a “unique” partnership between Volunteer Alberta, the government of Alberta’s Culture and Community Spirit program, and the province’s solicitor general’s office, which oversees all the police departments in the province. She adds that no other province has a program like this in place.

“We came up with a program called V.O.A.N ñ Volunteer Organization Authorization Number. We built the model on something we found in Australia, which has done this [successfully] for awhile. It’s an online program that organizations can apply to for a V.O.A.N. With that, they can use the number on their volunteer PICs, and the police force can then bill the government for that cost. So that V.O.A.N. is of no cost to the nonprofit,” she explains, adding that there have been unforeseen, positive ramifications for the province’s eligible nonprofits.

“This [initially] was a cost reimbursement program. But the change we noticed from our survey in 2006, is that nonprofits often use PICs as their only form of volunteer screening, and that just cannot be,” she said. “The other thing we noticed was that many organizations were getting PICs and didn’t need to for their particular risk management needs. Lastly, some nonprofits didn’t know what to do when a volunteer came back and said, ‘My file was flagged because 30 years ago I did a juvenile prank I was busted for.’ Well, people change in 30 years.”

To address some of these findings, Volunteer Alberta decided that in order to obtain a V.O.A.N., a nonprofit needed to prove it had a prior volunteer screening program in place that was actually implemented. Lynch says once this was stipulated, organizations who could prove it were able to “move fast” and get their numbers within 48 hours.

“Now, we’ve found out there’s a huge appetite from nonprofits who were initially denied a number,” says Lynch, “prompting many eligible sector organizations to put in their own screening practices and get their V.O.A.N.s. This is going to impact the sector. We can’t measure it yet, but we will,” she adds, but notes that it could be awhile before the province has statistics to show for the three-year project.

Whether you pay or not, screening is a must

When told of the program, Bruce Macdonald, CEO and president of Big Brothers Big Sisters Canada (BBBSC), said the national organization didn’t tell its local chapters how best to conduct their volunteer screening. But he did tell CharityVillage it was imperative that any nonprofit that hired volunteers to do work with sensitive populations shouldn’t hesitate to conduct checks and screens.

“Do it,” he urges.

“For us, approving prospective volunteers is much more than police background checks. They include those, but [volunteers] also have written references and a series of interviews with social workers,” he says. “Because you only get certain types of information from police background checks, we don’t think they’re comprehensive enough.”

That said, MacDonald points out that BBBSC does have national standards in place around child safety, one of which is that all volunteers must have a criminal background check done. This includes board volunteers and staff.

“Some of our local agencies will use a police department; others will use private sector firms for a fee to get the 24 or 48-hour turnaround. It really depends on the particular market. Some police departments can be backed up [and] others are now charging,” MacDonald explains. “But our accreditation teams have to see proof of background checks in the files of all volunteers and staff. All [local chapters] have to follow our national standards for how to process volunteers so they’re appropriately matched with children. They have to have ‘x’ number of references, criminal background checks…that part is consistent in all 135 BBBS agencies.”

MacDonald says his organization has received requests from other nonprofits about its screening methods and best practices due to the diligence it must use when finding volunteers to pair with children. But this happens less now because the issue of background checks is “now more commonplace” than it was 10 or 15 years ago, he adds.

Still, those who aren’t conducting checks but who know they should be are doing a huge disservice to their clients.

“Organizations that place adults in positions of trust, whether as a mentor, coach, a leader of a troupe, or whatever it might be…they should [do a background check] well,” he advises. “I can’t give you an exact percentage of how much time we spend on this, but I can tell you it is a lot. In a business like ours, choosing appropriate mentor-volunteers is basically our core business. We spend a lot of time making sure we get the best possible match, and one that’s safe.”

And there’s no room for error. BBBSC currently has 27,000 children matched with volunteers and welcomes roughly 5,000 new volunteers a year. With those numbers, the criminal or police background check budget for his organization is relatively high for the sector. According to Lynch’s numbers, BBBS Alberta spends upward of $35,000 a year using a private company to conduct its criminal history checks, because it can’t rely on municipal police departments to process their requests in a timely manner.

She said her project hopes to change this scenario.

To go private or not?

While Lynch’s V.O.A.N./PIC initiative is set to help eligible cash-strapped organizations in Alberta, it remains unproven. Many nonprofits needing similar services across the nation continue to opt for the sometimes faster, private background check companies plying their trade within the third sector.

One of the largest of these, BackCheck, has instituted its own new program aimed at helping defray costs to nonprofits that need criminal checks done.

Stephen Dinesen, vice president of marketing and business development for Vancouver’s Checkwell Decision Corporation – which owns BackCheck – told CharityVillage that he’s anxious to know more about Alberta’s new project, and hopes his specialized website for the sector, myBackCheck.com, could be incorporated into the program somehow, seeing as how both use online platforms as a main tool.

“The refund program in Alberta is something we are excited to work with and participate in. We look forward to discussing this with police services and voluntary sector organizations across the province,” he says. “myBackCheck.com provides provincial and nationwide infrastructure for voluntary sector organizations to order, track and audit criminal record checks. The PIC is a program that helps offset the cost. The combination could be great for the sector: Forgery-proof results, delivered quickly, with the cost offset by the government – that could be great, indeed.”

Dinesen notes that his company has “several thousand” clients, and his partial list reads like a who’s who of the nonprofit world in Canada. They include, Scouts Canada, Boys and Girls Clubs, Special Olympics, Big Brothers Big Sisters Canada, YMCA/YWCA, Canadian Camping Association, Alzheimer’s Society, Habitat for Humanity, and Salvation Army. “We also work with thousands of sporting organizations at provincial, local and national levels,” he adds.

His service “guarantees” an information turnaround time on criminal record checks in less than 24 hours.

Do your due diligence

So why would sector organizations looking to conduct criminal background checks choose a company like BackCheck over a police department? The answer is simple, Dinesen says.

“One of the key features of myBackCheck.com is ‘Sharing.’ This means an individual can order one criminal record check for their account, and then select one or more organizations to share their results with. This feature is used by about 20% of our [clients], and is saving organizations and individuals a lot of time and money.” Just how much money he did not specify.

However, it should be noted that the police are not exactly cut out of the loop in BackCheck’s process. The company has incorporated police services into its product. Applications are submitted to the police, who then conduct the checks on CPIC, the national repository for Criminal Records in Canada, which is maintained by the RCMP.

BackCheck charges $25 per criminal history check for voluntary organizations, which they say is 50% of what the company charges its corporate clientele for the same service.

If you check them, they will come

Whether or not the Alberta PIC initiative will spread through the nonprofit sector like wildfire, as Lynch imagines it might, remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: voluntary organizations working with vulnerable populations that do not currently conduct background checks on their volunteers need to rethink their master operating plans.

Andy Levy-Ajzenkopf is president of WordLaunch professional writing services in Toronto. He can be reached at andy@wordlaunch.com.

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