Setting the standard for safe sport communities, Lasso Safe has enacted the Lasso Safe Rating System and Certification, complemented by the Value Creation Plan. This system is innovative in its combined quantifying and incentivization approach to safe sport communities, as well as its inclusion of youth, amateur and professional sport communities. Under the Certification, private and organizational communitys are required to achieve safe community standards in the Lasso Safe Rating System, and maximize benefit through the Value Creation Plan. 

Over the last 10 years, the leaders of Lasso Safe have sought to make the communities in which we train, compete, work, dream and triumph safer, higher performance and less damaging to our sport culture. When Lasso Safe started there was no defined safe sport community movement. There was no way to know if a community was truly high performance and no agreed upon guidelines to help those who wanted to lead safe communitys. Lasso Safe created the Lasso Safe sport community program as a way to measure safe communitys and to provide a roadmap for developing a truly high performance culture that prospers through equality and excellence.

With Lasso Safe, the Lasso Safe Certification program created a simple, metrics-based system to define what a safe community is. Lasso Safe created a baseline – a universally agreed upon holistic system of metrics for reducing emotional, physical and sexual abuse and promoting athlete safety, higher performance and expanded athletic careers. And the program was embraced by a collective group of leaders – sport psychologists, sport policy leaders, sport media, athletic champions, non-profits, sport medicine doctors, sport community owners and managers, local communities and business leaders. Lasso Safe has been researching sport communities in our communities since 2001, and today, Lasso Safe has advanced into the most widely used safe community program in the world and an international symbol of safe community leadership and sport culture excellence. People know that if they are in a Lasso Safe-certified community they are protected from bullying, nutritional deficit or body shaming, sexual harassment or abuse, false accusations and over training, and that their commitment to athletic excellence will be honored in an eco-system that encourages positive body image, bodily integrity, the athletes’ voice, high performance through collaborative strategizing, ethical business leadership and community relations while increasing economic prosperity. They also know that they are in a community that prioritizes mental and emotional wellness.

As of July 2020, there are more than 350 sport communities researched, across 32 countries and territories, and more than 150 professional contributors from industries such as policy leadership, Olympic and professional athlete, psychotherapy, coaching, sport medicine, sport therapy and sport community ownership, spanning all divisions – from communitys hosting multi-sport, to Olympic training and competition, to athlete-owned, to youth, and even entire complexes. And our community of Lasso Safe professionals is Championship strong, with World and Olympic Competitors on our boards. In the first decade of our existence, we have made Lasso Safe a living standard for safe sport communities. We’ve set in place the structure to help us get where we need to go. And now is the time to fully move towards the leading, performance-based certification and monitoring model we developed as Lasso Safe Certify. 

Beyond requiring compliance with the Lasso Safe Rating System, Certification also requires the establishment of community and media relations, including affiliated safety communitys, city leaders and digital, local and national media. 

Augmenting the Lasso Safe Certification, Lasso Safe once again set the international standard for safe sport communities by passing the Gold Standard. Among other requirements, the Gold Standard requires annual safe community performance reporting using the Value Creation Reporting System and Safe Center Performance Reporting System, key components of the Value Creation Plan. All gold certified communitys must be benchmarked and reported, and all certified communitys have the option of maximizing their safety investment through the Value Creation Plan.

Enforcement of safety performance in Lasso Safe Certified communitys is the responsibility of the Lasso Safe Directors Division and Safety Board, who will require compliance verification before issuing certification or certification renewal.