Policies that aren’t followed aren’t protection.
They’re documentation.
For youth-serving organizations: a child protection culture that works for your program.
The Cost of Waiting
You have a policy on the books, but you may not know how well it works until you face a crisis. When a child discloses something serious or a parent accuses your staff member of bad behavior it is too late to find out whether your staff is following the written policy.
That gap between policy and practice rarely shows itself until you need it closed. Whether you’re growing fast or recovering from an incident, the question is the same: does your program hold up under pressure, or does it simply document what you didn’t do?
Built With You, Not Handed to You
Building or rebuilding a child protection culture is demanding work, especially while you’re still running the organization and answering to a parent organization or a board. That’s why we don’t hand you a manual and walk away.
Our Collaborative Development Model pairs our framework and firsthand experience building child protection programs with your organizational knowledge. You bring the authority to decide how it gets built. We build every policy and training along with your people. We don’t simply create something on paper and deliver it to them.
Our team includes co-founders Debbie Ausburn, an attorney and former DOJ prosecutor, and Tom Rawlings, a former juvenile court judge, along with a licensed clinical social worker, a doctorate-level counselor educator, and a school principal. Each of us has real-world expertise built inside youth-serving organizations.
Three Ways We Work Together
Policy Assessment
We compare your policy to what happens on the ground, then give you prioritized recommendations for what to fix first.
Policy Development
We build your full policy manual along with your team, so it works for your organization.
Cultural Change
We train your leadership and build a roadmap that turns your policy into daily practice, not paperwork that may come back to haunt you.
How We Get Started
Step 1
Discovery Call
We learn about your situation and assess fit together.
Step 2
Roadmap
We work with you to build a roadmap that includes scope, timeline, and next steps.
Step 3
Collaborative Engagement
We lead your team in building your policy. Your organization owns and runs it from day one.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does YSO Partners do?
YSO Partners helps youth-serving organizations build child protection policies and cultures that staff follow, not just documents that sit in a binder. We work directly with your team through three types of engagement: Policy Assessment, Policy Development, and Cultural Change.
How is YSO Partners different from a typical compliance consultant?
We don’t hand you a policy manual and leave. We lead your team through building every policy, training, and roadmap through our Collaborative Development Model. That model pairs your organization’s operating expertise with our framework and firsthand experience, so what we build works for your organization.
How long does it take to build a child protection culture with YSO Partners?
It depends on where you’re starting. A Policy Assessment takes 4 to 6 weeks, Policy Development takes 3 to 6 months, and a full Cultural Change engagement takes 6 to 9 months. Every engagement starts with a discovery call to determine the right starting point.