Dear responsible person at a Centre or Group

The policies and procedures contained in this document are intended to be adapted and tailored to your specific needs. Obvious slots exist for you to drop in your organisation name, or the job title of the relevant person, but it’s important to read through the policies fully before deciding whether further changes are required!

There are also consistent references to some key terms like “staff”, “volunteers”, “beneficiaries”, “Chief Executive”. Using “find and replace” it should be easy to edit these so that they reflect the references or terms most relevant to your organisation.

It’s deliberately low on formatting (they are rtf files which most software can work with) and design to make adapting it as easy as possible. Copying and pasting single policies into your own template should be easy, as should working the other way and dropping your existing policies into this document to create a comprehensive staff handbook.

While most of the policies are about procedures and processes, there are some relating to legal elements. Guidance around statutory provisions like parental leave etc. should always be checked against official guidance, and legal advice where necessary. 

Most importantly, policies on their own are pretty useless if nobody knows what they are, why they say what they say, and how to use them effectively. Good policies and procedures should empower staff, and increase consistency and fairness across an organisation. Imposing them from above rarely encourages engagement, so if you are using this as the basis for a bigger review of how you operate, we would strongly recommend communicating and engaging with staff throughout that process. 

And if you’ve got good policies and procedures in place, they’re no good sitting unread in a drawer or on a server. At DSC (Directory of Social Change, who provided these templates) they brief two policies every month as part of their staff briefing, which keeps them alive, reminds people of the most important things to remember, and helps to head off problems in advance. So they brief their performance review policy at the beginning of the year to remind everybody how it works, their annual leave policy in spring so that they don’t end up with everyone trying to book the same week off, that kind of thing. 

We hope you find these useful, and that they save you a small amount of time in developing your own policies, and a much bigger amount of time through having them in place when you need them the most.

We are not suggesting that you should have all these policies in place but some we expect to prove useful. This list is also not exhaustive: for example, safeguarding policies aren't here.

Let us know if you think something really needs to be added: info@triratnadevelopment.org