Archive for September 2nd, 2010

Center serves families in crisis

Center serves families in crisis
Nalley Marques and Casey Garcia grew up volunteering and each received a $1,000 George Miller Youth Scholarship award at the Monument Crisis Center’s seventh anniversary celebration.

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Safe Playground Equipment Guidelines

Playgrounds and outdoor playground equipment can offer your child enjoyment, fresh air, and exercise, but they can also pose some safety hazards. Faulty equipment, improper surfaces, and careless behavior are just a few of the dangers that cause children on playgrounds to visit hospital emergency departments. To ensure that your children have the safest playground environment possible, follow these guidelines.

• In the United States, a child is injured on a playground every 2 1/2 minutes.
• More than 200,000 children each year are treated in emergency departments for playground-related injuries.
• More than 75% of playground injuries occur on a public playground.
• Most playground injuries involve falls, and over half of the time the child’s head and face is hurt.
• Most of these injuries are preventable with proper supervision and safer playground equipment and design.

You can make the playground a place that’s entertaining and safe for your children by checking equipment for potential hazards and following some simple safety guidelines. In addition, teaching your kids how to play safely is important: if they know the rules of the playground, it’s less likely they’ll become injured.

Safety Guidelines

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funds the National Program for Playground Safety (NPPS), which works to prevent playground-related injuries by establishing detailed guidelines for safe playgrounds. According to the NPPS, the most important factors in evaluating the safety of any playground are surface, design and spacing, equipment installation, and maintenance.

The following types of equipment are not meant for safe playgrounds:

• animal figure swings
• glider swings that hold more than one child at a time
• swinging ropes that can fray, unravel, or form a noose (any kind of rope attached to play equipment poses a strangulation hazard, so never let your child tie jump ropes or leashes onto the equipment)
• exercise rings (as used in gymnastics) and trapeze bars
• Monkey bars: although people use the terms monkey bars, jungle gyms, and climbing equipment interchangeably, actual monkey bars are a specific type of climbing equipment with interior bars onto which a child may fall from a height greater than 18 inches. In the early 1980s, the CPSC stated that monkey bars were unsuitable for playgrounds.
• trampolines: these are never appropriate for safe playgrounds

Call Center Management on Fast Forward: Succeeding in Today’s Dynamic Customer Contact Environment

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Call Center for Youth

Ask any top call center firm and you will hear them admit that it’s difficult to get quality employees. Call centers suffer from dips in quality because the work done by their agents is far from what they would ideally want. The complaints of the BPO experts have inspired many telemarketing firms to train their agents exclusively. More such firms are investing time and resources in training the agents for the specific projects that they are working on. However, the pitfall of this system is that this is more of a damage control exercise than a step forward. The future depends on having industry-ready telemarketing services professionals who can work on projects with just a cursory glance at what is expected of them. That’s when you need to invest in training as a community of business process outsourcing units.

The call centers in the Philippines have achieved something similar. They have a body of BPO experts that pools funds for the training of agents. The trained agents can find employment in any call center that they choose to work in. The government of the country is making efforts to invest money in establishing a sort of school for telemarketing agents. The idea of setting up a training institute has worked wonders for the business process outsourcing sector of the country. Because of their trained alumni, the telemarketing services industry in these parts has a constant supply of agents who can do the work for them without compromising on the quality. The success of this initiative has split open the chances of other governments following suit to better BPO service in their countries.

This step is necessary not just for the quality of call center services. It’s also important for the economic growth of the country. Call centers generate great returns on investment (ROI). The ROI could be the prime reason why the administrators of these countries are willing to spend and allot time on the BPO sector. They realize the potential of this sector and what the young guns of their country can do for them. The other industries are overlooked when it comes to investment from the government. It’s the telemarketing sector that continues to get the favors. However, the efforts have to go up to ensure quality telemarketing services. And the young minds have to be trained from a marketing point of view. It’s only then that the quality of BPO service will go up.

It’s not just the bigger names of the call center industry that make a particular location a preferred BPO destination. There are other qualities why one place wins over another when choosing where to get your call center services from. That is when the entire telemarketing sector of a country has to look healthy. If there is an availability of enough manpower that can do a good job at answering service or at lead generation, investors would love to base their business in such a location. The youth of the country have a major role to play here. And it’s the business process outsourcing community’s duty to prepare them for their role in BPO service.

Adoption Network Law Center

Adoption Network Law Center – ANLC

Despite myths to the contrary, domestic newborn adoption remains alive and well in the United States. Current estimates of the annual number of infants adopted domestically (excluding foster and relative adoption) range from 25,000 to 30,000—more than all international adoptions combined. Moreover, the process can go much more swiftly that you might imagine. In a 2008 Adoptive Families survey, the majority of respondents were matched with a birthmother in less than 12 months, and 19% got “the call” to travel after the baby had already been born, without a prematch.

ANLC is a law center, not an agency, facilitator or law firm.

In most U.S. newborn adoptions, adoptive parents are selected by the birthparents of the child, and, in at least half of the cases, the birthparents and adoptive parents have met. Domestic adopters usually appreciate the opportunity to build a relationship with their child’s birth family. Ongoing contact is increasingly common, but the extent of contact varies significantly. A baby cannot legally be relinquished before birth. Most experts advise prospective adoptive parents to be careful about making an emotional commitment to a potential birthmother too early in her pregnancy.

Depending on the situation, and the laws of the state where the family lives and where the baby is born, prospective adoptive parents may cover some of the living and medical expenses of the birthmother.

If you’re just starting on the adoption journey, the wide array of choices before you can seem daunting at first–with each varying considerably from the next! With more options come more decisions, each with its own emotional and financial risks and benefits. To help you find the right path, here’s an overview of common routes to adoption.

Adopting a domestic infant via an adoption agency

Adoption Network Law Center: hopeful parents-to-be who seek a healthy, U.S.-born infant often enlist the help of an agency. Private agencies set their own criteria on applicants they will accept, some more restrictive than others. In the past, those using an agency had their names added to a list and waited for a match. Today, the trend toward openness means you’re likely to meet the birthparents, who may request ongoing contact with the child. The agency is likely to send a few sets of parent profiles to the potential birthparents, who pick the one they are most comfortable with. Then, the birthparents and adopting parents meet. At least half of the 15,000 or so domestic agency placements of infants each year involve such meetings. The child may be placed with the adopting parents immediately after birth or from foster care. If you insist on a closed process, your wait may be longer, since most agencies now encourage varying degrees of openness.

Adoption Network Law Center – ANLC article.