Becoming a care and protection organisation

When you’re approved to provide a community care and protection service, we’ll register and monitor your organisation.

Approved organisations can:

• support parents and their children to stay together or stay in contact
• provide foster and kinship carers and other safe homes for children
• care for children and young people in residential settings
• support children to return to their families
• help young people to transition to adulthood
• provide therapy and advocacy.

Get your organisation approved

Your organisation must be assessed as a suitable child safe organisation.

It must:

• prove it can provide services that meet the Care and Protection Organisation Standards
• have a responsible person to lead and manage the organisation and its services.

Before you can apply

You’ll meet with us to:

• tell us about the care and protection services you want to provide
• learn about the assessment process
• learn what information you need to give us to assess you.

Contact us to start.

Your assessment

Your organisation must prove it can provide quality, safe and reliable services to children and young people.

We’ll assess its:

• environment
• people (service staff, carers and volunteers, leadership)
• governance and financial viability.

Its responsible person must prove they can lead and manage the organisation and its services.

You can read the assessment criteria in the Suitability approval application guidelines.

If you’re not approved

If you do not agree with our decision, you may get the decision reviewed by the ACT Administrative and Civil Appeals Tribunal.

After you’re approved

We’ll add your organisation to the Care and Protection Organisation Register  [link to documents in Open].

Your legal responsibilities

You must tell the Human Services Registrar if something happens that changes your organisation’s suitability. For example:

• convictions for a sex offence, fraud or violence
• findings that you are not operating legally or ethically.

You must report some changes within 7 days.

You can be fined and imprisoned for up to 6 months if you do not let us know.

Check the list of suitability information in section 11 of the Suitability approval application guidelines.

Monitoring your organisation

We’ll monitor your organisation to check you are following the standards.

We may inspect you:

• with or without letting you know
• at any time of day or night
• for a specific issue or after a complaint.

Learn how we monitor approved care and protection organisations.

If your organisation stops meeting the standards

To protect children and young people, we will step in for serious or urgent issues.

Depending on the issue and how you respond, we may:

• give you a date to fix the problem
• stop you providing some services for up to 28 days
• cancel your registration.

Learn how you’ll get notified if you do not meet the standards.

Contact us

You can contact us for help or advice.