Focusing on safety will help your not-for-profit organisation protect its staff (including volunteers) and the people it serves, comply with its legal obligations, and attract and retain funding, volunteers, staff and members. Here are five things you should know about safety, risk and insurance in your not-for-profit.
1. Your organisation has a duty of care
Your organisation’s obligations come from various sources, but two important ones are negligence law and work, health and safety law.
Generally, under negligence law, your organisation has a duty to take reasonable care to avoid causing foreseeable harm to those it could reasonably foresee may be affected by its activities. You can find out more about your organisation’s duty in our Negligence fact sheet.
2. Your organisation may have extra obligations under WHS laws
While negligence laws apply broadly, work, health and safety laws (WHS) apply only to workplaces. The purpose of WHS laws is to protect the health, safety and welfare of employees, volunteers and others who are at, or come into contact with, a workplace.
You can find out whether WHS laws apply to your organisation and the key WHS duties in our National guide to work, health and safety laws. If your organisation involves volunteers, our National Volunteering Guide – Part 4 explains how these laws apply to you and your volunteers.
Whether or not WHS laws apply to your organisation, you are still likely to have a duty under negligence laws. So, it’s a good idea to focus on safety.
3. Your organisation’s duty extends to protecting mental health
When we think about safety, we often think about preventing physical harm, but safety includes safety from psychological harm. This means an organisation’s duty to protect the health and safety of workers expressly includes psychosocial risks to health and safety.
Find out more information about psychosocial risks to health and safety in our National guide to work, health and safety laws.
4. Your organisation must work to eliminate sexual harassment from the workplace
Sexual harassment is one of many ‘psychosocial hazards’ to workers. Recent changes to the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth) impose a new positive duty to proactively prevent sexual harassment and sex-based discrimination in workplaces. You can find out more about this change in our article ‘New duties to prevent discrimination, harassment, and psychosocial risks in workplaces’.
5. Your risk management process should show how your organisation takes reasonable steps to meet these obligations
While claims against not-for-profit organisations are rare, your organisation should aim to operate in a way that reduces the risk of harm to those involved.
Risk management is a process for identifying what could go wrong (ie. risks) before it does, then using strategies to avoid or reduce the impacts of these risks.
Thinking about managing risk doesn’t have to be scary or a negative process. It may be a chance to improve what you do.
How you implement risk management will depend on the size, activities and structure of your organisation. But, as a minimum, your organisation should have a risk management plan for work, health and safety risks including the following steps:
- Spot or identify risks
- Assess each risk
- Fix or control the risks
- Evaluate and update your plan.
(This makes an easy to remember acronym – SAFE!)
You can find out more in part 5 of our National Guide to work, health and safety laws and the Model code of practice: How to manage work health and safety risk from Safe Work Australia.
Interested in understanding more?
We run easy to understand training to help organisations make sense of the law. Contact our training team if your not-for-profit is interested in engaging us to deliver tailored training on this or another topic.
This article was produced in collaboration with the Queensland Council for Social Service (QCOSS).
The content on this webpage was last updated in October 2024 and is not legal advice. See full disclaimer and copyright notice.
