First and foremost, not all of our community engagement has been visible. We've had scores of conversations, email interactions, and volleyed messages with community members using other media. We've trawled forum threads at length and taken down suggestions. We've sent surveys and reviewed the data. We've received suggestions forwarded by the Board. Even though we have yet to hold anything like a town hall meeting, a tremendous amount of feedback has been received and taken into account.
With that said, much of this early work has been our work to do, changes we knew we had to make, and ones that (frankly) did not require community input. For example, we are in the final contracting stages with ID.me for both volunteer identity verification and for teacher/educator verification on the YWP website side. We have already tested three separate criminal background checking services with international capabilities and we're looking at a fourth. Background checks were something we decided (and announced) in November and it was our role to perform budget planning and to do our due diligence around vendor selection.
Additionally, we retained new counsel and have gone through legal review of our policies and procedures. We've updated our Terms and Conditions and our Codes of Conduct on our site and a Privacy Policy update is in the works. We worked with our attorney to update the Municipal Liaison agreement and to develop a separate agreement for other volunteers. We also rewrote our employee handbook (as the Board noted in November, certain staff practices needed attention). On the tech side, we worked with our internal team to roadmap more than 20 back-end changes that are needed to support new community safety and security backstops. And we handled several personnel issues.
The inner workings of the program certainly need input from our community and we are on the brink of soliciting more, but there was plenty for us to do internally, things that serve as the foundation of our program moving forward.