Youth Protection and HEPNet

In this episode of URMIA Matters, Julie Groves, URMIA’s immediate past-president and Director of Risk Services at Wake Forest University, interviews Lindsay Bond, Executive Director at HEPNet, about her important journey into the realm of youth protection. Lindsay shares how her career path took her from teaching to sports management to being passionate about the protection of minors. Noticing a gap in the association world for those working in youth protection, she and along with other like-minded colleagues founded the association known as HEPNet, the Higher Education Protection Network, as a community to share resources and knowledges with fellow youth protection professionals. Julie and Lindsay also explore the framework that HEPNet’s new Professional Competencies for Youth Protection in Higher Education provides for those interested in learning more. Additionally, Lindsay discusses HEPNet’s Youth Protection 101 pre-conference workshop at URMIA’s upcoming Annual Conference 2024, and what attendees hope to learn. Tune in to this episode to hear all about HEPNet and the protection of minors! 

Show Notes [member log-in required for some content]

• URMIA’s Annual Conference 2024
• URMIA’s Annual Conference 2024 Agenda Attendee Hub Website (Registration required to access)
• HEPNet
• HEPNet’s Annual Conference, October 21-24 
• HEPNet’s Professional Competencies for Youth Protection in Higher Education 

 Guest

Lindsay Bond, Executive Director- HEPNet 

 Host 

Julie Groves, Director of Risk Services- Wake Forest University 

Connect with URMIA & URMIA with your network
-Share /Tag in Social Media @urmianetwork
-Not a member? Join ->www.urmia.org/join
-Email | contactus@urmia.org

Give URMIA Matters a boost:
-Give the podcast a 5 star rating
-Share the podcast - click that button!
-Follow on your podcast platform - don't miss an episode!

Thanks for listening to URMIA Matters!

Transcript

Jenny Whittington: Hey there. Thanks for tuning into URMIA matters, a podcast about higher education risk management and insurance. Let's get to it. 

Julie Groves: Hi everyone. I'm Julie Groves, the Director of Risk Services at Wake Forest University and I'll be your host for this episode of URMIA Matters. Today I'm chatting with Lindsay Bond, who is the Executive Director of HEPNet, or the Higher Education Protection Network. We're going to be talking a little bit about HEPNet, what they do and how our members can benefit from our partnership with them. So welcome to the podcast, Lindsay. We're so glad you're here. 

Lindsay Bond: Thank you. I appreciate being here. 

Julie Groves: So, before we start, why don't you just tell us a little bit about yourself? I mean, when you were little, did you dream of growing up and working in youth protection? Was that your dream as a child? 

Lindsay Bond: You know people that know me, know that my life is in color-coded spreadsheets, and I never had an exact path, still not for my professional career. My goal has always been to learn as much as I can and be prepared for something when it opens. So, once I got to college, I decided I wanted to be a teacher. And then once I started student teaching, I didn't feel like I could make a difference in kids’ lives with how scripted education had become. I was a graduate assistant in Rec Sports working with youth programming, so I thought, hey, they're paying for it, might as well get a Masters in Sport Management as well, which is another one of my passion areas. That led to working in adapted recreation with people with disabilities and loved it. Got on full time with youth programming and adaptive rec.  

And then after Sandusky, Ohio State created a committee to look at how are we serving youth? What protections do we have in place for that? And I was representing the rec sports on that committee. They created the position after a little bit of time, and I had always joked that I wanted to save the world, and I wasn't sure where to start. So, like, hey, “let’s stop child abuse.” Let’s start there. So, I was lucky enough to get the job and it's important to me to feel like I'm doing something with my time and not just collecting a paycheck. And when I started traveling more for my job, my daughter at the time told my son before I left for a trip, he wasn't thrilled about me leaving and she said, well, not everyone is as lucky as we are, and we have to let Mommy go sometimes, so that she can help other people protect, learn how to protect kids. So, that tells me that I'm in the right place and I am doing something to make a difference in the world. So, that's it for me. 

Julie Groves: Well, I mean. If you're going to try to save the world, I think the best place to start is certainly with kids. And so that's very admirable. And my hat is off to you for doing that. So, thank you for your work in that area. So, OK. So, since you have a little background in sports, OK, if you had to pick what is your favorite sport? 

Lindsay Bond: To play or watch? 

Julie Groves: OK, you can have one answer for each. If they're different, you can have one answer for each. 

Lindsay Bond: And to play- soccer. 

Julie Groves: OK. 

Lindsay Bond: And to watch, I feel like I'm biased because it's football season, college fantasy sports. It's college sports. If you asked me a couple months, my answer would probably be basketball. Because basketball. Yeah. 

Julie Groves: Oh yeah. Oh, definitely. Because it will be basketball season. Do you like to watch soccer too, or you just like to play it? 

Lindsay Bond: I do, and I play it, and my kids play it. So, we are all big soccer players here. 

Julie Groves: Well, good. Well, that's great. Well, thanks for giving us a little bit about your background. So, I'm sure that some of our listeners know about HEPNet and may even know what it is. But for those who don't, can you just tell us a little bit about what it is and how it came into existence? 

Lindsay Bond: Yeah. And I will start off with, I'm sure I'm biased, but we have an amazing group of people. Very supportive community of individuals working both within and outside of higher education to prevent child abuse. And being from Ohio State, I used to say that I not only wanted the kids at Ohio State to be safe, but the kids at the University of Michigan too. We just talked about football. So, you know the gravity of that statement. 

Julie Groves: I understand. 

Lindsay Bond: And that's the mentality of our members too. They truly, especially with the field being so new, they want to help people, and they want to give them resources and it really is an honor and a privilege to guide our association and provide our members with the most resources possible. How we got started when I got in my role at Ohio State, I became familiar with URMIA very early on, due to my relationship with our risk manager at Ohio State. And it was great at addressing risks, but it was all the risks in higher ed. And I knew the American Camp Association, but higher ed is so much more than just youth programs, so much more youth programming than just camps. So, there wasn't an association just for us.  

When I was in Rec Sports, I was really involved in our professional association, NIRSA. And so, one of my questions in my interview was, you know, what associations are out there? And there wasn't any that was a perfect fit. So, at the time, Ann Franke was holding monthly phone calls and they got pretty big. And it was pre-Zoom, so everyone's just hearing each other on the phone and so either no one would talk because they didn't want to talk over someone, or everyone would talk at the same time. So, I talked about my organizational skills before. It wasn't a color-coded spreadsheet, but I did create a Google group for people to have a list serve to share policies for feedback and review, and after about two years of that, we had over 200 people in the Google group. So, we decided it was time to formalize and create an association. We're actually a 501C3. It took us 16 months to incorporate, and we opened our membership doors in May of 2017. I joked that I was the most organized, so they picked me to be the Executive Director from the steering committee, but we've been around for seven years now, and we were fortunate to celebrate our five year anniversary with URMIA in Indianapolis. So, we really enjoyed that. 

Julie Groves: Well, great. Well, congratulations on that. I was not too long ago, the President of URMIA and had the opportunity to go to the CHEMA meeting, which is the Council of Higher Ed management associations and it's amazing to see that there is a higher ed organization for everything on campus, which is great, right? Because a college campus is like a small city and so, to your point, you did something very important that there wasn't a group already in existence of others who did the same thing. And so, you know, kudos to you for kind of spearheading that and making that come to fruition. Because as I know from URMIA, the greatest thing is to be among people who do what you do, who share your role, who share your role, and who can help be sounding boards and help share resources. And so, it's great that you all have done that. So, talk a little bit about what kind of programming you offer for your community? 

Lindsay Bond: We do regular webinars. We have our annual conference. So, we joined you all in 22 and that was great. Getting back into the in-person environment with a partner like URMIA, very humbling to stand there, as you all were celebrating your 50th something and we were celebrating our five years. So, that was a humbling experience to see where we could become and what we would look like in those years. We do workshops, we have boot camp, we have actually- we're doing a session on kind of an introduction to youth protection at the URMIA conference, and we do that at our conference too.  

And we found out that a lot of people left with more questions than they had answers, which I tell them in advance that will happen. So as a follow up to that, we created boot camp a few years ago and really walk people through what's involved in that youth protection policy? How do you create one? What does that whole process look like? So that's been fun to teach. Our secret sauce is in the HEPNet hub. It's an interactive space for members to ask questions, get involved in mentoring resources, networking. And then, of course we, you know, have to add in gamification. So, they get participation points for bragging rights, which they take very seriously. So, I could, I'm pretty sure our current hub member could tell you that right now they like to brag on that. 

Julie Groves: Right, right. And I think you recently released a set of professional competencies for youth protection. So, can you talk about those, sort of how they were developed, and maybe tell us a little bit about how you expect folks to use those competencies? 

Lindsay Bond: Absolutely. That was such a fun project to work on, and so it's such a great experience to be a part of the first professional competencies and higher ed youth protection. And to be, you know, just put my touch on the legacy there was a really great experience. Most of these protection programs across the country have been around for less than two years. So, in the history of higher education, where we all know, things move very slowly, this is a very new field and we haven't been able to make large impacts or we have been able to make pretty large impacts pretty quickly relatively, but it doesn't always feel quick. A lot of our work up till now in the first seven years has been focusing on our member relationships, resource development, programming, infrastructure. But we know that we need legitimacy in this field, because there's always at least one university leader that thinks, oh, that would never happen here. 

 So, under the direction of our former chair, Caroline Shelton at the University of Washington, we pulled together a group to look at what skills someone needs to not only excel in this field, but to just function. Because we know there's a lot of risk managers, general counsels, even admins working in this space, and they're not full time. So, we wouldn't expect them to have the same level of competency that someone has that does this 100% of their time. So, we identify the areas where competence is needed and then levels within each developing, performing, and excelling. While we would love to see everyone excelling, we know that with the multiple hats that people wear, along with the relative newness of this field, a lot of people don't even have a youth protection person. Then that wasn't likely that someone was going to excel in all the areas, so we wanted to give people a road map to work towards that excelling.  

In terms of how we would use these competencies, I think both internal and external use is likely. Meaning self-reflection on one’s own professional journey, but also in performance management. We hope that someone could take these to their performance review and say hey, this is where I'm at, this is where I was at the beginning of the year, this is where I'm now. Using it as pre- and post-assessment for conferences, whether it be URMIA or HEPNet or programs like boot camp, so they can literally see what they've learned. I hope that someone can point to these and validate the need for a role or higher compensation depending on the knowledge that someone has. So, I think what we hear a lot is that it's being repeated, this is important, this is important, we need to put resources towards it. And so, for us to be able to emerge as the squeaky wheel on the behalf of others and say, yes, this is important, this is what we have identified the needs and the competencies, so that we can help people advocate for themselves and their areas is where we're hoping to help raise those voices. 

Julie Groves: URMIA just refreshed our competencies a year or so ago, and I was on the committee that helped with that. And you're right, it's very interesting to do. It's a daunting project. So, but I think to your point, it's a great opportunity for people who work in that a certain field to have this tangible list of things and go to their performance evaluation and say, these are all the things that I’m accomplished at. Because you know, I think a lot of times it's hard for most people to sit down and act actually quantify what they do in their job. Right, and so, if you have something like these competencies, it really helps to direct conversations, you know, for the folks who work in these areas. So, congratulations on getting those developed. As you mentioned that was in Indianapolis with URMIA and you all are partnering on a pre-conference seminar coming up, but when you listen to this, it'll already be getting ready, but so don't let that be confusing. But that's right. So y'all are going to be with us at the URMIA Conference in New Orleans. And so, what is this seminar going to look like? And what kinds of things can people expect? 

Lindsay Bond: We are so excited to join URMIA again. It's been such a pleasure getting to know all of the risk managers. Not all because you guys are a huge conference, but getting to know so many risk managers over the past years and just the breadth of knowledge that you all have is incredible. And I know that a lot of the risk managers there don't have a youth protection person and so I get stopped in the hallways all the time, hey, how do we do this? How do we do that? And I love those conversations. So, it's been a great partnership to be able to do the Youth Protection 101 for this audience in particular. Because we have that knowledge, and we want to share that. We don't expect us again with it being the newer field and not as much now, and you know you don't have to start from scratch anymore. We've done this work, and so to be able to help people develop what those trends are and youth protection policies we know now that most policies are covering at a registration component where, so you know what programs are happening when, there's a training and education component, there's background checks or standards of behavior, there's a reporting mechanism. And seven years ago, it wasn't known what those commonalities were, so to be able to help someone learn more about those spaces has been a lot of fun.  

I mentioned boot camp, but it really digs deep into what a policy looks like and how to get there. But not everyone has that time to invest, and they need a lower entry point. So, the 101 is what you might expect in higher ed and introduction to the risk and how to mitigate it. We have a portion where we broadly overview the risk and then we dig deep into background checks, reporting, registration, training, and compliance. Then we end with a panel discussion, which is I think always very beneficial because there's so many questions in this space, and how I did things at Ohio State is very different than how Montgomery College is doing it. So, bringing in the private and the public sector and the large and the small universities is really helpful to just get that that wide perspective. I think people like I said before will have more questions and answers, because every university is different. But we have a decision guide to help them determine what those next steps are and the questions that they need to ask. And then of course, have boot camp, you know, for people that want to go deeper. But the 101 is just a great session for the introduction to the risk, and in general, what do these policies look like? What do we need to be thinking about? 

Julie Groves: I think panel discussions are always so helpful, because there's usually a wide enough variety of people on there that there's something that everyone who's in the audience they can relate to, or there's, you know. So, I just, I really appreciate those. And so, it sounds like this is going to be a great pre-conference seminar. I think the folks at URMIA and the folks at HEPNet, even though we work technically in different areas, we do a lot of things that align with one another and really dovetail. So, I think it's great to have you all as a partner. So, we are looking forward to seeing you all in New Orleans and glad that you can be there with us. So, before we close, is there anything else you'd like to share with our listeners? 

Lindsay Bond: Go bucks! 

Julie Groves: So yes, I would say my takeaway from this conversation is that all youths deserve to be safe, even if they're the youth of your rival team. So that's our little nugget for today. So, thank you so much for being here today, Lindsay. I will look forward to seeing you in New Orleans and this wraps another episode of URMIA Matters. 

Narrator: You've been listening to URMIA Matters. You can find more information about URMIA at www.urmia.org. For more information about this episode, check out the show notes available to URMIA members in the URMIA Network library.