Ex-cons may be volunteering for non-profits. Many of the organizations wouldn’t know, however, because they don’t screen their volunteers.
The National Center for Victims of Crime this morning released a study that says one in three non-profits in the U.S. don’t run background checks on volunteers, and one in eight don’t do any type of screening. These usually are agencies that serve populations vulnerable to victimization, such as the elderly, poor or disabled. An audit of background checks found more than 187,000 people with criminal convictions tried to volunteer or work on the staffs of non-profits that did perform screenings. Of those, more than 2,700 were sex offenders.