Privacy Policy

Effective 6 August 2026. This is version 1. If we change it we will change this date and note what changed.

Who we are

SEVA SANGAT FOUNDATION is a volunteer run not for profit society in British Columbia. British Columbia's Personal Information Protection Act applies to societies and not for profit organisations, and it applies to us.

Our Privacy Officer

The foundation has designated a Privacy Officer, who is responsible for how we handle personal information and who answers questions and complaints about it.

What this website collects

Nothing. Specifically:

• No cookies are set by this website.
• No analytics or measurement tools are installed. We do not know who visits or how many.
• No third party scripts, fonts or embeds. The typefaces are served from our own site rather than from an external font service, so no request about you is made to another company.
• No advertising or tracking pixels.
• The forms send, but store nothing. When you press send on the volunteer form or the contact form, what you typed is passed to a small program of ours running on Cloudflare, which turns it into an email and delivers it to our inbox. It is not written to any database, any file or any log. If that send fails, the form offers you Gmail, your own mail application, or copy and paste instead, and in that case nothing leaves your browser at all.

Our website is hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Like any web host, Cloudflare processes standard connection information such as IP addresses in order to deliver the page to you and to protect the site from attack. We do not receive, request or store that information, and we cannot use it to identify you.

What we collect when you contact us

When you email us, call us, volunteer, partner with us or give us goods, we collect only what we need:

• Contact details: your name, email address, phone number and the city you are in.
• Volunteer information: the role you are interested in, your availability, languages you speak, and any skills you tell us about.
• Screening information, where a role requires it. If your role brings you into contact with children, seniors or people in a vulnerable situation, we will ask you to obtain a criminal record check with vulnerable sector screening. We record only that a valid check exists and when it expires. We do not keep copies of the results.
• Correspondence: what you wrote to us and what we wrote back.

We do not ask people who receive help from us to identify themselves, register, or be photographed. Where a programme requires any record at all, we keep the minimum and we say so at the time.

Why we collect it, and your consent

We collect personal information only for purposes a reasonable person would consider appropriate: to reply to you, to organise volunteers and programs, to meet our legal obligations as a society, and to keep people safe. We ask for your consent at the point of collection, and consent is never bundled or pre ticked. You may withdraw your consent at any time by writing to our Privacy Officer, and we will act on it, subject to any records we are legally required to keep.

Who we share it with

We do not sell, rent, trade or lend personal information to anyone, ever. We share it only in these situations:

• With a partner organisation, only where you have asked us to make a referral or introduction, and only with your consent at the time.
• With our service providers, only as far as is needed to operate. Email sent to any address at our domain is forwarded by Cloudflare Email Routing into a Google Gmail account that we read. Our website is hosted on Cloudflare Pages. All three store and process data outside Canada, including in the United States, which means that data may be accessible under the laws of that country. We will name any further providers here as we adopt them.
• Where the law requires or permits it. This includes our duty under the Child, Family and Community Service Act to report a belief that a child or youth needs protection, and any lawful order or request from a public body. We will not stay silent about a child's safety to protect a confidence.

How long we keep it, and how we protect it

We keep personal information only as long as it serves the purpose it was collected for, or as long as the law requires. Volunteer records are kept while you are active with us and for a reasonable period afterwards. General enquiries are deleted once they are dealt with. Records we are required by law to retain are kept for the period the law sets.

Information is held in access controlled accounts, seen only by the team members and volunteers who need it for their role, and covered by a written confidentiality agreement signed by every volunteer. If a breach ever occurs that could reasonably be expected to cause you significant harm, we will tell you and we will tell the appropriate authority.

Your rights

Under the Personal Information Protection Act you may:

• ask what personal information we hold about you, how we have used it and who we have disclosed it to;
• ask us to correct anything that is wrong;
• withdraw your consent to our use of it;
• complain about how we have handled it.

Write to our Privacy Officer at info@sevasangatfoundation.com. We will respond within the time the Act allows. If you are not satisfied with our answer, you may take the complaint to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia at oipc.bc.ca. You normally have 30 business days from our reply to ask them for a review.

Email and consent to be contacted

We only email people who have asked us to. Our list is maintained by hand from people who wrote to us and said yes. Every message we send identifies the foundation, gives a valid way to reach us, and tells you how to stop receiving them. Asking to stop takes effect straight away, and always within ten business days, which is what the law allows at most. We do not buy, rent or scrape email addresses.