Dear CKC Members,

We hope this message finds you well during this difficult time. The COVID-19 crisis has caused an increase in workload for many of us in our community and certainly shifted much of our efforts to responding to the evolving government restrictions – and now deconfinement measures – put in place to respond to the global pandemic.

Through this period, we have continued with our roll out of the CKC Safe Sport Policy which was passed by the CKC Board of Directors in February. With this policy now in force, the mechanisms for dealing with reporting and properly addressing Maltreatment, Harassment and Abuse within our CKC system are operating. Details of our CKC Safe Sport Policy and approach and contact information for our Independent Safe Sport Officer are available here.

The phase we are now in is one of education and support to our membership in adopting the CKC Safe Sport Policy within their own organizations. To facilitate this process, a membership declaration has been created and we are targeting July 1^st as the date by which members will have adopted the CKC Safe Sport Policies and will begin compliance with its directives.

Through this process, valuable feedback from our membership has been collected and key changes in the national landscape have arisen which have led us, as CKC Staff, to make a recommendation to the Board of Directors to revise certain elements of our CKC Safe Sport Policy.

The proposed revisions will include:

1. Clarification within the Screening Policy around which roles in our community will require which level of Screening and Education.
2. Integration of the newly released Safe Sport Training module developed by the Coaching Association of Canada into the Screening Policy.
3. Creation of an independent screening process, to be managed by a CKC-mandated independent third party which will relieve member organizations from bearing this responsibility.
4. Facilitation of the revised screening process through ckcmember.ca.

We are moving forward with the proposed revisions as quickly as possible; however, the decision has been made that our educational webinars, scheduled for next week, outlining our policy and CKC community approach to Safe Sport should be delayed so that these changes can be made to the Policy and presented as clearly as possible to our membership.

We recognize the inconvenience of further delaying the webinars but we consider that the modifications and enhanced approach will benefit our community and will facilitate a smoother and less burdensome implementation of the Policy for all members.

We will follow up shortly with dates for these rescheduled webinars, as well as the date for a BC specific webinar to account for the time difference.

Thank you for your understanding as we update our policy to best fit our community’s needs.

Ian