Safety Knights

The big thing is to determine your goals and objectives of what you want to achieve. Do you want them to help with audits? Perform reviews on procedures? Investigate incidents?

Also need to figure out who needs to be on it, but ideally a representative from each department or area. You should list expectations of these committee members, as well. This could include how many meetings they have to attend each year, how long they can serve on the committee (if you do terms/rotations), what happens if they don't meet these expectations, etc.

Typically, the goals I try to set when I help establish for the committee (adjusted based on committee size) for our customers are:
-Involve employees in safety management
-Lower the rate and severity of accidents and injuries
-Maintain a safe workplace
-Involve all employee participation in safety programs
-Develop new safety policies (as needed) and communicating those policies to all employees.
-Serving as a review board for all accidents, incidents, and/or close calls involving employees, members of
the general public, Company vehicles, and/or property. This includes recommending safety measures that
could prevent similar occurrences in the future.
-Establish a procedure for reporting hazardous conditions or activities and taking corrective action.
-Periodically inspect facilities to see that they are complying with established environmental, health, and
safety policies and standards and to identify and correct hazardous conditions.
-Determine environmental, health, and safety training needs, including the identification, handling,
storage, and disposal of hazardous materials, and developing a plan of action to guarantee the required
safety training is accomplished.
-Ensuring that first aid kits and personal protective equipment needs are met.
-Review training and compliance status

This can be adjusted for your site, as some may be your responsibilities as the safety pro, but this is the general list I make for companies who don't have a designated safety pro, like when safety falls on HR.

We have a different department host the safety committee meeting each time. Usually our agenda will include reviewing recent incidents and action plans from the incident, a short training topic, a review of policies/procedures that need updating, and the host department gives tour of their work area and points out hazards and controls. During the tour we encourage the other members of the committee to ask questions and look for hazards. Because the committee members may not be familiar with the departments operations, they often point things out that aren't recognized by the department as hazards.

Along with the great resources you will find here, Reach out to your company's Insurance Company and link up with their risk management. They more than likely have a great deal of resources that will help you out in this process. They usually offer their support and services for low to no cost. They have a vested interest in you not filing claims. The last few contracts that I have worked on, I have done this with them and was able to get many policies and programs as well as training from them.
I am in the process of putting together a safety committee and working on changing a culture as well.