APP Membership: A Glance At The Past & Environmental Criteria Updates for The Future

“The only time you should ever look back is to see how far you’ve come” – Author Unknown

I began volunteering with the Membership Committee in 2009. Originally, I thought each idea I had which I believed would further our mission statement would be a quick and easy change to make. Make the suggestion, state your case, done and done! Volunteering for a non-profit health and safety organization — one whose membership has grown immensely at the same time body piercing’s popularity has surged — has taught me change and improvements often come slowly and deliberately.

When I first started with the Membership Committee, our application process consisted of mailing a hard copy application and your video recorded to a disc (or VHS!) to the APP office. Then it got shipped to a volunteer. After being reviewed, it got shipped to a second volunteer for final review. This wasn’t the hardest thing when we were averaging maybe a couple dozen new Members a year. As the number of applicants began to drastically increase, through much work and trial and error, we improved upon the process and have now moved to a strictly online application. This has reduced costs and improved the applicants wait time. We are currently working on utilizing our new website’s features to even further streamline the application process. You’ll hear more about that in the coming months.

This application process was created because it isn’t financially or practically feasible to fly a Membership Committee volunteer to each applicant’s studio to do a walk through for environmental criteria. Similarly, when receiving a complaint about a member breaching their Health & Safety agreement, it is just not feasible to drive across the country (or to another country for that matter) to see for ourselves.

In April of 2017, the Board of Directors informed APP Members of a new update to our Membership Environmental Criteria:

“All piercers working at an APP Member studio (members or non-members) will only use appropriate jewelry for initial piercings as listed in the current APP minimum standard.

Any use of non-compliant jewelry for initial piercing by any person (member or non-member) in the studio is considered a breach of environmental standards and can be grounds for losing membership.”

The APP Board of Directors and the APP Membership Committee feels this newest standard will help to further spread safe piercing practices and our organization’s mission statement.

If you have any questions in regards to this updated policy please do not hesitate to contact us at membership@safepiercing.org

All members will have until January 1, 2018 to become compliant with this new environmental standard.