Privacy Policy

Who We Are and What This Covers

RISE Alberni is a community nonprofit in Port Alberni, BC. We run English classes, settlement support, skills and employment programs, community connection work, an anti-racism initiative, emergency resilience work, and a paid K-12 tutoring service.

This policy explains how we handle personal information about the people we work with: learners, participants, parents and guardians, tutors, volunteers, donors, sponsors, and anyone who contacts us. It covers information you give us through this website and information we collect in person, by phone, by email, or by text.

Personal information means information about an identifiable person. Your name, email address, phone number, and details about your family or your goals are all personal information. Business contact information, meaning the information used to reach you at your workplace for work reasons, is treated differently under BC law and is not covered by most of these rules.

This policy does not apply to other organizations. When we link you to a service in our resource directory, that organization handles your information under its own policy.

Our Responsibility

British Columbia's Personal Information Protection Act, usually called PIPA, sets the rules for how organizations like ours collect, use, and disclose personal information. We follow it.

We are responsible for the personal information under our control, including information we pass to a service provider to handle on our behalf. Everyone at RISE who works with personal information is expected to know and follow this policy.

Privacy Officer

We have designated a Privacy Officer who is accountable for our privacy practices and who answers questions and complaints. To reach them:

• Email: info@risealberni.org, with “Privacy” in the subject line
• Phone: 250 206-5178
• Mail: Privacy Officer, RISE Alberni, 4511 Gertrude St, Port Alberni, BC V9Y 6J9

What We Collect and Why

We collect only what we need to do the thing you are asking us to do. If we do not need it, we do not ask for it.

When you contact us or ask about a program

Our website forms ask for your name and email address, and sometimes your phone number, so we can answer you. The message box is free text, so it holds whatever you choose to tell us. We use this to reply, to answer your question, and to figure out which program fits.

When you join a program

Intake for classes and programs is a conversation, not a form. Depending on the program, we may record your contact details, your goals, your language level, your availability, and notes about the support you are looking for. We use this to place you in the right class, to match you with a tutor or a worker, and to follow up with you.

Some of our funders require us to report how many people we served and in what general categories. We give funders counts and summaries. We do not give funders your name or your file unless you have agreed to it, or unless the law requires it.

When you ask about tutoring for a student

Our tutoring inquiry form asks for the name, email, and phone number of the adult making the inquiry. The message box usually holds information about a student, such as their grade level, subjects, and learning goals. We use it to match the student with a tutor and to arrange scheduling and billing.

When you apply to tutor or to volunteer

Our tutor application form asks for your name, email, phone number, the subjects and grade levels you can teach, and a description of your experience and credentials. If your application moves forward we may also ask for references and a criminal record check, because you would be working with children and youth. We use all of this to decide whether to bring you on and to match you with students.

When you give or sponsor

Our sponsorship form asks for your name, email address, and optionally the name of your business, club, or group. If you give, we record the amount and the date so we can issue a receipt or an invoice and keep proper financial records. We do not take payments on this website. Gifts arrive by e-transfer or cheque and are handled by our bank and our accounting records.

When you visit this website

Our website collects some technical information automatically. That is covered in its own section below.

Consent

We collect, use, and disclose personal information with your consent, except in the limited situations where PIPA allows or requires us to act without it.

Consent can be given in writing, out loud, or electronically. Sometimes it is implied rather than stated. If you fill in our contact form and send it, you are clearly consenting to us using your email address to write back. For anything more sensitive, or anything you would not reasonably expect, we ask you directly.

We tell you why we are collecting something at the time we collect it, or before. We will not refuse you service because you declined to give us information we do not actually need.

Changing your mind

You can withdraw your consent at any time by telling us, as long as withdrawing it does not conflict with a legal obligation or an agreement we have with you. Give us reasonable notice and we will explain what it means in practice. Sometimes it means we can no longer provide a service. For example, we cannot match a student with a tutor if we cannot keep the student's contact details.

When we may act without consent

PIPA allows collection, use, or disclosure without consent in specific circumstances. The ones most likely to come up for us are:

• When the law, a court order, a subpoena, or a warrant requires it.
• When there is an immediate risk to someone's health or safety, including where we have a legal duty to report a child who may need protection.
• When the information is needed to collect a debt you owe us or to pay a debt we owe you.
• When it is information about an employee or a contractor that we need to manage the working relationship.

How We Use and Share Information

We use personal information for the purposes we identified when we collected it, and nothing else, unless you agree to a new purpose or the law allows it.

We do not sell personal information. We do not rent, trade, or share our contact lists or donor lists with anyone.

Inside RISE

Staff, contract tutors, and volunteers see personal information only when they need it to do their work. A tutor is given what they need about their own students and nothing about anyone else's.

Service providers

We use outside companies for things like website hosting, form handling, email, and file storage. They handle personal information only on our instructions and only to provide that service. Several of them are based in the United States, which means information can be stored on or accessed from servers outside Canada and can be subject to the laws of that country, including lawful access by foreign courts and agencies. We tell you which ones we use in the website section below.

Referrals to other organizations

Sometimes the right help is somewhere else. We do not pass your information to another organization unless you ask us to or agree to it. Usually we just give you the contact information and you decide.

Photos and stories

We sometimes photograph events or share a participant's story in a newsletter, a grant report, or on social media. We ask for permission first, separately, and you can say no or change your mind later without it affecting the services you get.

This Website: Cookies, Analytics, and Forms

This site is a static website. It has no accounts, no logins, and no shopping cart. There is nothing to sign into and no profile stored here.

Hosting and server logs

The site is hosted by Netlify, a company based in the United States. Like any web host, Netlify's servers automatically record technical details of each request, including IP address, browser type, and the page requested. These logs exist for security and reliability.

Forms

Our forms are handled by Netlify Forms. When you press submit, what you typed is sent to Netlify's servers, stored there, and emailed to us. This means anything you write in a message box travels through and sits on servers in the United States. Please do not use our web forms to send us health information, immigration file details, financial details, or anything else you consider sensitive. Call us or come in instead.

Analytics

We use website analytics to understand which pages people find useful and where they get stuck. We use it to improve the site, not to identify you. We use two tools:

• Google Analytics 4, a service of Google LLC. It sets cookies in your browser and collects things like the pages you view, roughly how long you stay, your approximate location based on your IP address, and your device and browser type. Google processes this data on its own servers, including in the United States, under its own privacy policy.
• Matomo, an analytics tool we run ourselves rather than through an advertising company. It sets its own cookies and collects a similar set of technical details. It is served through our own domain so that the data goes to our analytics server instead of a third party's.

We do not run advertising pixels, we do not use these tools to build advertising profiles, and we do not connect analytics data to the information you send us through a form.

How to turn analytics off

You can block or delete cookies in your browser settings, and most browsers let you block tracking scripts entirely. Any standard content blocker or privacy extension will stop both tools. Google also publishes a browser add-on that opts you out of Google Analytics everywhere. If you would rather we exclude you and you are not sure how, email us and we will walk you through it.

Links and embedded content

Our resource directory links to many outside websites. Once you follow a link you are on someone else's site, under their privacy policy, and we have no control over what they collect.

How Long We Keep Information

We keep personal information only as long as we need it, or as long as the law requires.

When we use personal information to make a decision that directly affects you, PIPA requires us to keep that information for at least one year after the decision so that you have a fair chance to ask to see it.

Beyond that, our general practice is:

• General inquiries that go nowhere: deleted within about a year.
• Participant and program records: kept while you are with us and for as long as our funders and our auditors require afterward, then destroyed.
• Tutor and volunteer applications we did not proceed with: kept for about a year in case a suitable match opens up, then destroyed.
• Financial records, including donation and payment records: kept for the period Canadian tax and charitable accounting rules require.

When information is no longer needed we destroy it securely, or we strip out anything that identifies a person and keep only anonymous statistics.

Keeping Information Accurate

We make reasonable efforts to keep personal information accurate and complete, especially where it is used to make a decision about you or is shared with someone else.

If something we hold about you is wrong or out of date, tell us and we will correct it. If we agree the correction is reasonable, we will make it and pass the corrected version to anyone we disclosed the old version to in the previous year. If we do not agree, we will attach a note to the file recording what you asked for and that we did not make the change.

How We Protect Information

We protect personal information with security measures appropriate to how sensitive it is. That includes:

• Administrative measures: limiting access to the people who need it, and expecting staff, tutors, and volunteers to keep what they learn confidential.
• Physical measures: keeping paper files in locked storage at our office.
• Technical measures: encrypted connections across the whole website, password protection and multi-factor authentication on our accounts, and reputable service providers for hosting and email.

If something goes wrong

If personal information is lost, stolen, or accessed by someone who should not have it, our Privacy Officer investigates, we contain the problem, and we notify the people affected where there is a real risk of harm to them. We report to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner where that is required or appropriate.

No system is perfectly secure. Email and web forms in particular travel across networks we do not control, which is why we ask you not to send sensitive details that way.

Children and Youth

Our tutoring service is for K-12 students, so we hold information about children and youth. It comes to us from a parent or guardian, not from the student directly.

This website is not designed for children and our forms should be filled in by an adult. If a young person has sent us information through this site and their parent or guardian would like it removed, email us and we will delete it.

Where a young person is old enough to understand what they are agreeing to, we take direction from them as well as from their parent or guardian. Where they are not, we take it from the parent or guardian.

Seeing Your Own Information

You have the right to ask us for:

• A copy of the personal information we hold about you.
• An account of how we have used it.
• The names of the people and organizations we have disclosed it to.

Send your request in writing to our Privacy Officer at info@risealberni.org or by mail. We may ask you to confirm your identity first, so that we do not hand your information to someone else.

We will respond within 30 business days. If we need more time, we will tell you why and how long we expect to take. Access is normally free. If a request takes substantial work to fulfil, we may charge a minimal fee, and if so we will give you a written estimate first and wait for you to approve it.

There are narrow situations where the law does not let us release something, for example where releasing it would reveal personal information about another person, or where the information is protected by solicitor-client privilege. If we have to refuse, we will tell you in writing, explain why, cite the part of PIPA we are relying on, and tell you how to have that decision reviewed.

Questions and Complaints

Start with us. Contact our Privacy Officer at info@risealberni.org, call 250 206-5178, or write to us at 4511 Gertrude St, Port Alberni, BC V9Y 6J9. Tell us what happened and what you would like us to do. We will look into it and write back. We may need to confirm your identity before we can discuss a file.

If we cannot resolve it, or you are unhappy with our answer, you can take it to the provincial regulator:

• Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia
• PO Box 9038 Stn Prov Govt, Victoria, BC V8W 9A4
• Phone: 250 387-5629
• Email: info@oipc.bc.ca
• Website: oipc.bc.ca

Complaining costs you nothing and it will not affect the services you get from us.

Changes to This Policy

We review this policy periodically and update it when our practices change. The date at the top of this page shows when it last changed.

If we ever want to use personal information we already hold for a genuinely new purpose, we will ask for your consent rather than quietly rewriting this page.