Practices & Procedures

Protecting Campers from Sexual Abuse

March 1, 2012
By Yvonne McCarty
Protecting Campers from Sexual Abuse

Last week Howard Longino, Camp Safety Director at Redwoods, presented to a packed room of camp professionals on “Bullying and Sexual Abuse Prevention” at the ACA National conference. People literally sat on the floor, eager to hear practical and sustainable practices that can prevent a child from being abused at camp. Many didn’t realize...

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Reducing Premiums through Safety #3 – Criminal Background Checks

July 21, 2010
By Dan Baum
Reducing Premiums through Safety #3 – Criminal Background Checks

For our next look at ways your association can control long term premiums through safety, we’ll be looking at the importance of criminal background checks for preventing abuse.  If you missed our introduction to how risk management can impact your premium, please look back to the first post in this series. Here are the rankings...

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Mapping for Better Supervision

July 19, 2010
By Dan Baum
Mapping for Better Supervision

Effectively supervising children is the best way to prevent injuries at camp this summer.  This gets more challenging as the summer goes along though, as counselors start to tire or get too comfortable during camp activities.  Counselors standing in the corner of a play area talking, or a staff member sitting on the bleachers...

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Reducing Premiums through Safety #2 – Reference Checks

July 14, 2010
By Dan Baum
Reducing Premiums through Safety #2 – Reference Checks

For our second look at ways your association can control long term premiums through safety, we’ll be looking at the importance of reference checks for preventing abuse.  If you missed our introduction to how risk management can impact your premium, please look back to the first post in this series. Here are the rankings for reference...

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Reducing Premiums through Safety #1 – Applications

July 7, 2010
By Dan Baum
Reducing Premiums through Safety #1 – Applications

Here at Redwoods, we rate our policies according to the exposure at each YMCA, JCC or Camp.  This means that our customers can control their premiums over the long run through risk management.  By strengthening their safety practices, they can eliminate some of their exposure to loss and earn either larger premium decreases, or...

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Keeping Camp Healthy

June 21, 2010
By Dan Baum

Having dealt with scares in previous summers from MRSA, H1N1 and other health challenges, it’s important to take a fresh look at what your camps are doing to keep campers and staff healthy this summer. We’ve found a couple of great resources on this topic.  First, the CDC’s 2010 H1N1 Guide for Day and Resident Camps...

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Awareness Test

June 14, 2010
By Dan Baum

The video below contains a great awareness test.  Take it and see if you can pass before reading further: Thanks to the folks at Think! and Transport for London for their work on developing this video, and to Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris for coming up with the idea for the test.  It’s certainly a fun...

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38% of Soccer Goal Tip-Overs Result in Death

June 8, 2010
By Dan Baum
38% of Soccer Goal Tip-Overs Result in Death

Recently, an unsecured soccer goal tipped over and injured a child on one of our customers’ fields.  Thankfully, the injury was only a laceration on the child’s head, but we’ve seen significantly worse injuries from these incidents and thought it might be time to dig into the data and share. The key takeaway is that...

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Tip-Over Hazards Video

May 11, 2010
By Dan Baum

Tip-over injuries and deaths are some of the worst tragedies we’ve seen in the programs we partner with.  Securing dangerous items and performing routine checks for tip-over hazards at all of your sites, though, can prevent these kinds of incidents.  Watch the video below for more information on how you can protect against these...

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Social Networks and Camp

March 13, 2009
By Stephen Dauchert
Social Networks and Camp

Today there are almost too many social networks to keep track of: Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are the largest. Last month Facebook reached over 175 million users. These networks are available for anyone to join and can lead to problems at your camp. The Today Show recently posted an article about “Social Netiquette” (http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/29616648/). It...

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