Running a Club
Clubs provide enormous community and social benefits. They also have a responsibility to offer a fair, safe and equitable sporting environment. When running a club, it is important to consider and enforce codes of conduct, risk management strategies and member protection guidelines to ensure everyone has a fun, safe and inclusive experience.
Member Protection– Does your club Play by the Rules?
Member protection is about ensuring policies and procedures that support safe and fair behaviour are in place, and that members are aware of a complaints procedure if breaches or offences occur. SRV supports a range of initiatives to ensure this occurs, including the interactive website
Play by the Rules.Working with Children
In 2005 the Victorian Parliament passed the Government’s Working with Children Act. The impact of the legislation is broad, and aims to cover people who work with children in a variety of contexts, including sporting organisations. The Working with Children Check provided for in the Act will start in 2006 and will be phased in over five years.
The Government will support the important contribution of volunteers to the Victorian community by fully subsidising the cost of the Working with Children check for volunteers.
Choose With Care - Building Child Safe Organisations seminars provide practical strategies to prevent child sex abusers gaining access to children in your programs. The seminars are open to staff and volunteers from children and youth focussed organisations, programs and groups. They outline practical and straightforward steps to ensure that you provide the safest environment possible for children, young people and staff. For further information please contact
CHILD WISE.Sports Injury Prevention
Sport and recreation participation has a number of benefits, including the enhancement of physical and mental health. However, sports-related injuries may limit or reduce the benefits obtained from participation.
Promoting and assisting the delivery of safer sport and active recreation is an important part of encouraging lifelong physical activity.
Sport and Recreation Victoria provides funding for research and evidence based information development and related promotional activities under the Sports Injury Prevention Research Grants Initiative. Read more about the outcomes from the Initiative (PDF 146 kb).
Smartplay
Smartplay was formed in 1998 through an agreement between the Department of Human Services, Sport and Recreation Victoria and VicHealth. It is currently funded in Victoria by VicHealth and Sport and Recreation Victoria. The program is managed and delivered by Sports Medicine Australia - Victorian Branch.Smartplay's mission is to assist in reducing the frequency and severity of injury associated with sport and active recreation activity in Victoria.
The program facilitates injury prevention practices to foster safer and more supportive environments for physical activity, through a range of communications and policy development based strategies.
Public Liability Insurance
The Victorian Government is working to ensure community organisations can access Public Liability Insurance to enable them to undertake their activities with appropriate cover in place.
Risk Management
In response to insurance-related issues impacting on the sport and recreation industry, the Victorian Government has committed $400,000 over four years to the Sport and Recreation Risk Management Initiative.
The focus on risk management is a response to research that identified strong sports risk management processes as the best investment sports can make to reduce their premiums.
Two projects have been implemented through this initiative:
VicSport Risk Management ProjectUniversity of Ballarat - Risk Management Evaluation Project (PDF 289kb)
A new project, managed by
Vicsport commenced in June 2006. The project will involve the development and trialling of activity based and sport specific risk management standards in two sports.Volunteer Protection Legislation
Introduced on 15 March 2003, the Volunteer Protection Legislation (PDF 644kb) recognises volunteers as the lifeblood of the community sector, including sport and recreation organisations, by providing them with legal safeguards.
The legislation defines a volunteer as an individual who provides a service in relation to community work (which includes sport and recreation) on a voluntary basis. A volunteer acting for an incorporated community organisation cannot be held liable in any civil proceeding for anything done, or not done, in good faith while providing a service in relation to community work organised by a community organisation. Instead the community organisation will be liable to pay the compensation.
This important legislation means that volunteers who are acting responsibly within organised sport and recreation can play their important roles without concerns about being personally sued. However, it is suggested that you obtain independent legal advice to discuss the effects the legislation will have on your organisation.
User Friendly Sport
There are many steps that sport and recreation clubs can take to be more user-friendly to a wider range of people.
User Friendly sport - An ideas book to help sport and recreation clubs grow includes:
- examples of how to keep existing members and attract new ones by drawing on the experience of other clubs
- a model code of conduct for parents, players, spectators and coaches
- tips on how to prevent unsporting behaviour
Keeping sport fun and safe - Codes of behaviour for user friendly junior sports clubs provides guidance on behaviour in junior sport settings.
The core principles of the codes of behaviour are that junior sport should:
- be fun
- be safe
- be fair
- 'belong' to juniors
The codes are available in several community languages.
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