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Easter & spring festivals

Two hundred children released at once, and one volunteer nobody can identify

A spring egg hunt is not a smaller trunk-or-treat. It is a burst of unstructured movement across an open field, staffed by people recruited days earlier — and it includes the only role in volunteering designed to hide the person's face. Screen every one for $5.

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CHARACTER + HANDLERboth screened · never aloneTHE WHISTLE

The role everyone forgets

Somebody is inside the costume

Every other volunteer at your event has a face, a name tag and a reputation. The costumed character has none of those, and the role puts them in physical contact with one child after another, in a posed photograph, with a queue of parents watching but nobody actually able to see what happens inside a foam suit.

It is also the role most often filled at the last minute, by whoever will do it. That combination — anonymous, physical, improvised — is why it deserves the most attention and usually gets the least.

  • Screen whoever is in the suit, every time — including the volunteer who steps in when the scheduled person cancels an hour before.
  • Log who wore the costume, in which time slot. If a question is ever raised, "we are not sure who it was" is the worst possible answer.
  • Never let a costumed character be alone with a child. A handler stays with the character at all times — that is standard practice at theme parks and it should be standard at your event.
  • No lap-sitting without a parent present and in frame. Kneeling beside a child photographs better anyway.
  • The handler, not the character, manages the queue. The person in the suit has almost no peripheral vision and cannot hear well.

The same reasoning applies to Santa and costumed characters at holiday events.

An egg hunt has different physics

If you have run a fall festival, do not simply copy the plan across. The crowd behaves in a completely different way.

It starts with a whistle, not a queue

A trunk-or-treat moves children station to station in a line. An egg hunt releases two hundred of them across a field at the same instant. For about ninety seconds nobody — not a parent, not a volunteer — knows where any specific child is.

Separation is the most likely incident

The realistic bad outcome at a spring egg hunt is not an assault; it is a four-year-old who cannot find their adult, being “helped” by someone nobody has vetted. Design for that first, because it will actually happen.

Community events have no roster

Church and school festivals at least know who signed up. A park department egg hunt is open to the public, and the volunteer list frequently includes whoever answered the call on social media two days earlier.

Holy Week stacks events on top of each other

Egg hunt Saturday, extra childcare through Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, and two or three additional Easter Sunday services with expanded nursery. That is four child-facing events in one week, each staffed by a different set of people.

Plan the field, not just the roster

Screening tells you who is safe to place. The field plan decides whether anyone is ever alone with a child in the first place.

STAFFED PERIMETER — ONE WAY IN, ONE WAY OUTAges 1–3Ages 4–7Ages 8+LOSTCHILDSeparate the age groups, staff the perimeter, and put two screened adults at the lost child station.Toddlers and eight-year-olds hunting the same field is how children get trampled and separated.

Screen these, not those

Sorting the roster this way lets you accept every offer of help without making an exception you would struggle to defend later.

Screen

Costumed characters

Face fully covered, physical contact with children, posed photos. The single most sensitive role at the event.

Screen

Photo booth & photographers

Handling images of minors, positioning children, and controlling where those photos end up afterwards.

Screen

Lost child station

By definition alone with a distressed, unaccompanied child until an adult is found. Screen and staff it with two people.

Screen

Age-group field marshals

Walking toddlers to their zone, helping them fill baskets, and often carrying them back to a parent.

Late sign-up OK

Egg stuffing & field setup

Happens the night before with no children present. A fine place for last-minute or unscreened help.

Late sign-up OK

Parking & perimeter

Supervised, outdoors, no unsupervised child contact. Another good landing spot for late sign-ups.

Photos of other people's children need a decision, not a default. Decide before the event who may photograph children, where those images are stored, and whether they can be posted. A screening check says nothing about what happens to a photo afterwards. What our $5 search does and does not cover is set out in the Trust Center.

Questions organizers ask

Do Easter egg hunt volunteers need background checks?

The ones with unsupervised access to children do. Some municipal events already require it — the 2026 Parks and People egg hunt in Baltimore, for example, required a completed background check for volunteers 18 and over. Field marshals, the lost child station, photo staff and anyone in costume should be screened. Egg stuffing and setup, which happen with no children present, generally do not need it.

Why screen the person in the Easter Bunny costume?

Because it is the only volunteer role designed to make the person unidentifiable while placing them in physical contact with children for photographs. If something is reported afterwards, the costume is exactly what makes it hard to investigate. Screen the person, log the shift, and keep a handler with them.

We are a parks department, not a church. Does this still apply?

It applies more. Public events draw a volunteer pool with no shared community and no roster history, and municipal risk managers tend to ask harder questions than church boards do. The screening standard is the same either way: unsupervised contact with children is the trigger.

How much does it cost to screen 25 spring event volunteers?

$5 each — $125 for 25 people — and only for volunteers who complete their application. No subscription, no platform fee, and unused credits never expire, so leftovers roll into your summer programming.

How quickly can we screen volunteers before an event next weekend?

Volunteers apply from their phones in a few minutes and clear results typically return within the same session. A week is enough time provided the link goes out immediately — the constraint is how fast people fill in the form, not how fast results come back.

What about Holy Week childcare and extra Easter services?

Treat those as ordinary children’s ministry shifts, because that is what they are — just staffed by people who do not normally serve. Anyone covering nursery or classrooms across Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday should be screened to the same standard as your regular rotation.

Can we reuse checks from last year’s event?

Yes. Most organizations re-screen on a one- to two-year cycle rather than per event, so a volunteer cleared for last spring or for a fall festival is already covered. Spend the budget on the new names instead.

Running the fall version too? See fall festival & trunk-or-treat screening, or plan the whole year with the volunteer screening calendar.

Set it up before sign-ups open

Create your organization free, put the link on the sign-up sheet, and know exactly who is cleared to be near a child — including whoever is in the suit. $5 a volunteer.

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