Privacy policy

Niagara Volunteer Opportunities (NVO) is a free directory of volunteer opportunities across the twelve Niagara municipalities, built for high school students working on Ontario's 40 community involvement hours. It is run independently and makes no money. There are no ads, no paid listings, and nothing about you is ever sold or rented.

If you have a question or complaint about privacy, email privacy@niagaravolunteer.ca. We read those ourselves.

You need to be at least 13 to apply for an opportunity here. Individual opportunities often set a higher minimum, and every listing shows that number.

We ask for the year you were born when you apply. We use it once to check the opportunity fits, then throw it away. We do not store your birth year or your date of birth; all we keep is a yes/no that the check passed.

We do not knowingly collect anything from anyone under 13. If you are a parent or guardian and think we have, email privacy@niagaravolunteer.ca and we will delete it.

When you apply for an opportunity:

• Your name and email address.
• Your phone number, if you give one. Some organizations ask for it; NVO never requires it.
• A parent or guardian's email or phone, only if you choose to add one as an emergency contact.
• Your answers to any questions the organization put on its listing.
• Which opportunity you applied to, and when.

When you subscribe to the newsletter, we store your email address and the date you subscribed. When you report a listing, we store what you told us and your email if you gave one.

We do not ask for your school, your grades, your student number, your address, or anything about your health or your family's finances. An organization must not ask for those either. If one does, please tell us.

Students never have accounts. The only people who sign in are staff and volunteers at organizations that post opportunities, and the people who run NVO. If that's you, this is what we keep about your account:

• Your name, if you added one, and your email address.
• Your role (organization or NVO admin) and which organizations you belong to.
• When your account was made and when you last signed in.
• Any passkeys you add. Those are held by Supabase, the company that runs our sign-in. We never see your fingerprint or face. That stays on your device.
• Invitations you sent or accepted.

On your account page you can change your name, download a copy of all of this, and delete your account yourself. Deleting your account does not delete your organization, its listings, or the applications students sent to it. Those belong to the organization.

The activity log. The portal keeps a record of changes people make in it, like a listing being approved, an organization's details being edited, or an invitation being sent. Each entry says what changed, when, and which account did it. It holds no student details: applications and attendance are never in it. Only the people who run NVO can read it, nobody can edit it, and entries are deleted after 24 months at the latest.

The organization you applied to. That is the whole point of applying: they get your name, email, any phone number or emergency contact you gave, and your answers, so they can reply. They may also record whether you showed up and how many hours you volunteered.

The people who run NVO. To keep the site working and to deal with reports.

Nobody else. Your details do not go to your school, your school board, other organizations, or advertisers. We never sell or rent your information.

These services process information on our behalf. They are not allowed to use it for anything of their own.

• Supabase: the database. Our data is stored in Supabase's Canadian region.
• Vercel: hosting for the website itself.
• Resend: sends the emails the site needs to send.
• Google: only for organization and administrator sign-in. Volunteers, including students, do not need an account and cannot create one.

• Applications: 12 months, then they are deleted automatically.
• Newsletter: until you unsubscribe. Every email has an unsubscribe link.
• Reports about listings: up to 12 months after the report is dealt with.
• Organization and admin accounts: until you delete your account, or ask us to.
• The activity log: up to 24 months.

You can ask us to delete anything sooner. See below.

You can email us any time to:

• ask what we hold about you,
• have something corrected,
• have it deleted, or
• ask us to stop emailing you.

Write to privacy@niagaravolunteer.ca from the address you used, or tell us which opportunity you applied to, so we can find the right record. We will do it and write back.

If you have an organization or admin account, you don't need to email us for most of this: download your data or delete your account from your account page.

One thing we cannot do: once an organization has your application, we cannot delete their copy. Ask them directly. Their contact details are on the listing.

The public site sets no advertising or tracking cookies. A short-lived cookie is used to remember an age check that did not pass, so the question is not simply asked again. Organizations and administrators who sign in get a normal sign-in cookie. The dashboard also remembers a few things in your own browser, like a filter you picked, a tip you hid or a listing you haven't finished writing. Those never leave your device until you save them.

If you tick "Remember my details on this device" when you apply, your name, email and phone numbers (and any parent or guardian contact you add) are kept in that browser for up to six months, so the next application form fills itself in. They stay on your device and are never sent to us until you apply. Untick the box, or press "Forget them", and they are wiped straight away. Your birth year and your answers are never saved.

Everything is stored in a database with row-level security, which means an organization can only ever read applications to its own listings, enforced by the database rather than by the website code. Access to the whole database is limited to the people who run NVO.

If information is ever lost or exposed in a way that could cause you real harm, we will tell the people affected and report it to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

NVO is a directory. We do not screen, vet, supervise or employ the organizations listed here, and we do not verify volunteer hours. If the hours are for school, your school and the organization's supervisor do that. There is more detail in our terms of use.

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top. If a change matters to people who have already applied, we will say so on the site.