Children, Youth and Family Safety

Children & Youth gives church teams one safeguarding-first workspace for child and youth ministry. Authorized guardians can keep family safety details current in the mobile app, while approved staff can plan sessions, run check-in, page a guardian, and verify each pickup.

​

Start With the Right Workspace

​

Before You Start

1. Name the leader accountable for your safeguarding policy and emergency response.
2. Confirm that every child has a member record with an accurate birth date.
3. Give ordinary management, check-in, and sensitive safety access only to the people who need each responsibility.
4. Agree on how legal guardians, custody restrictions, authorized pickup people, ID checks, and manual exceptions will be verified.
5. Confirm required volunteer screening outside TheFaithApp before recording a leader as cleared.
6. Create a test room and session, then rehearse arrival, label printing, paging, verified pickup, an incident, and emergency reunification.

​

Set Up Rooms and Safe Staffing

Open Settings and create each children, youth, or family room. Record its age range, capacity, maximum children per volunteer, minimum volunteer count, and whether two cleared adults must be present. Open Sessions & Classrooms to create a dated session. Choose the room, check-in window, lesson title, and optional lesson-plan link. Assign leaders and record their role, adult status, clearance status, and whether they are present. The session shows warnings when its capacity, ratio, minimum staffing, or two-cleared-adult rule is not met. A warning is a prompt for human action; it is not an automatic safety approval.

​

Create a Child Safety Profile

Open Families, then select Create child safety profile. Choose an existing minor member and record only the information needed for safe ministry, such as:

• Preferred name and grade
• Allergies, medical or dietary notes, and accessibility needs
• Emergency contact details
• Custody or pickup restrictions
• Photo and media consent
• Emergency-care consent

Safety details and restrictions are protected separately from the ordinary member directory.

​

Add Guardian Authority

Add each guardian explicitly, including a guardian who is not in the child’s household. Grant only the responsibilities that person has: profile management, check-in, pickup, waiver signing, or emergency contact. Household membership alone does not grant legal authority. Revoking a guardian stops future access while preserving the audit history.

​

Add Authorized Pickup People

Record every person who may collect the child, their relationship, whether an ID check is required, and an optional end date. Guardians can also add or revoke pickup people from My Family when their relationship allows profile management.

​

Run Check-in and Pickup

A guardian can preregister an eligible child from My Family during the configured check-in window. Check-in staff can also preregister the child after choosing an authorized guardian.

1. Open Check-in & Pickup and choose the session.
2. Select Arrive only when the child is physically present. Preregistration alone does not count as attendance.
3. Select Print labels to print paired child and guardian pickup labels for active roster entries. The child label includes an allergy alert when one is recorded.
4. Use Page guardian when the guardian needs to return. The notification preview stays generic; the private message is visible only after opening the protected family page. Tapping the notification opens My Family whether the app is active, in the background, or starting cold.
5. At pickup, choose the authorized person and enter the guardian’s six-digit code.
6. Confirm any required ID check and select Verify & release.

The pickup code expires when the child is released or the registration is cancelled. A code mismatch never silently releases the child.

​

Manual Pickup Override

Only staff with sensitive family-safety access can see the manual override. Use it only after a supervisor verifies the exception. A reason is required, and the release is recorded in the restricted audit history.

​

Emergency Reunification

Use Start emergency on a live session to begin an accounted-for roster. Authorized staff mark each checked-in child as accounted for and continue to use verified pickup for releases. The emergency cannot be closed while a child on the live roster remains unaccounted for. Practice this workflow with your team before relying on it during an incident. Keep your church’s offline fallback roster and emergency procedure available.

​

Incidents

Open Safety & Incidents to record a restricted incident for a child, with the time, severity, short summary, action taken, and whether a guardian was notified. Resolve the incident only after the church’s required follow-up is complete. Keep the record minimal. Counseling, abuse disclosures, discipline casework, and ongoing pastoral care belong in your church’s formal safeguarding or Pastoral Care process, not in casual leader notes.

​

Youth Activities, Trips, and Waivers

Open Youth Ministry for direct links to the existing Events, Forms, and family-safety session tools, plus invite-only youth-group management.

• Create the invite-only youth group, then assign youth, guardians, and approved adult leaders from member connections.
• Use the leader workspace for announcements, study guides, attendance, and brief operational notes.
• For a safeguarding concern, create the restricted Pastoral Care case first. Link only its case number from the bounded safeguarding-handoff note; keep the disclosure and care narrative out of group notes.
• Provision discussion or announcement channels. When minors are present, posting requires an active guardian or two approved adult leaders. Direct messages with a minor and disappearing messages are blocked.
• Create the activity or camp in Events for registration, capacity, payments, and reminders.
• Use the restricted Youth activity permission or Camp and trip waiver form template. Guardian signing authority is checked against the child’s active relationship.
• Create a youth session when the activity also needs age, staffing, attendance, emergency-contact, and check-in safeguards.

These controls reinforce, but do not replace, the church’s two-adult communication and safeguarding policy.

​

Send Parent and Guardian Announcements

Email and SMS campaign recipient selection includes reusable All active guardians, Guardians of children under 13, and Guardians of youth ages 13–17 audiences. Each audience refreshes from active explicit guardian relationships and includes only guardians with a usable address or mobile number for that channel. Revoked relationships and other churches’ records are excluded. Operational parent pages remain protected, acknowledged safety messages with a generic push preview; they are separate from campaigns.

​

The Member Experience

Add the My Family system page to the church’s mobile navigation in App Customization when guardians should open it directly. An authorized guardian can:

• See only children connected by an active explicit guardian relationship
• Review the safety details their relationship permits
• Update a child profile when granted profile-management access
• Add or revoke authorized pickup people
• See a Home family badge for active check-ins, unread pages, pending forms, and reminders
• Resolve child-specific consent, emergency-contact, profile-review, pickup, and form reminders
• Open pending permission forms and waivers under the correct child
• Preregister for an open session and show a large pickup pass
• Retain an active pickup pass temporarily in encrypted device storage when connectivity fails; it is removed after expiry, cancellation, or sign-out
• Read and acknowledge a ministry page opened from a generic push notification
• Continue to Bible plans, assigned permission forms, and church events

​

Assigned Staff on Mobile

An adult volunteer sees mobile staff mode only for a current session where the church has explicitly assigned them and recorded the required clearance. The roster shows the minimum child safety details needed for the room, but never the pickup code. Arrival and emergency accounting follow the assignment; paging, verified pickup, and emergency start/end remain restricted to session leads. Pickup codes, medical details, custody restrictions, and private page content are not included in notification previews or ordinary directory views.

​

Current Product Boundaries

• The clearance field records the status your church has already verified; it does not run a background check.
• External background-check providers, native printer verification, physical Android-device checks, iOS validation, signing, and store-track validation remain rollout gates rather than deferred product features.
• Android emulator QA verifies generic parent-page push display and My Family routing in foreground, background, and cold-start states. Populated emulator QA also covers offline/retry, staff roster privacy, emergency accounting, page acknowledgement, and verified release. Confirm native printer output, supported physical devices, iOS behavior, and store release gates before enabling the workflow for a live ministry session.