Terms And Conditions

Welcome to our website. By using it, you’re agreeing to the following terms of use. 

• Accessibility
• Privacy policy
• Cookies

Your use of this website is subject to the following terms: 

The content of the pages of this website is for your general information and use only. It’s subject to change without notice. 

We try to make sure that the information on this site is accurate. However, we can’t guarantee the accuracy, timeliness, performance, completeness or suitability of the information and materials on this website for any particular purpose. You acknowledge that such information and materials may contain inaccuracies or errors. 

Your use of any information on this website is entirely at your own risk. It’s your responsibility to make sure that any products, services or information available through this website meet your specific requirements. 

This website contains material which is owned by or licensed to us. This material includes, but is not limited to, the design, layout, look, appearance and graphics. Reproduction is prohibited.

From time to time this website may also include links to other websites. These links are provided for your convenience to provide further information. They do not signify that we endorse the website(s). We have no responsibility for the content of the linked website(s). 

Your use of this website and any dispute arising out of such use of the website is subject to the laws of South Africa, but also England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Accessibility

We want you to enjoy using our website, and to be able to access the information you need quickly and easily. With this in mind, we’re continually working to update our website to make it as accessible as possible to everyone who uses it. 

PDF documents 

We might use PDF (Portable Document Format) documents on our website to make certain information available for you to download and view. PDFs are a common file format used on the internet. You will need the Adobe Acrobat reader in order to view them. If your computer doesn’t already have this installed you can download Acrobat Reader from the Adobe website. 

The accessibility of PDFs has improved in recent years for those using assistive technologies such as screen readers, navigation through the keyboard and enhanced screen viewing. You can find information about using these features on the Adobe website. 

Privacy notice

1. Introduction

Your privacy is a top priority. We’re committed to always being a good custodian of your personal information, handling it in a responsible manner, and securing it with industry standard administrative, technical and physical safeguards.

We follow two guiding principles when it comes to your privacy:

• transparency – we work hard to be transparent about what personal information we collect and process
• simplicity – we try to use easy-to-understand language to describe our privacy practices to help you make informed choices

About us

HOPEguardians is a brand owned by The Tuttle Foundation LTD a company registered in England and Wales (company number 13299850), registered address East Manor Stonelands, Selsfield Road, West Hoathly, WEST SUSSEX, RH19. As a company Limited by Guarantee, The Tuttle Foundation has three trustees who are legally obliged to ensure The Tuttle Foundation stay true to its Articles of Association.

If you have any queries about this privacy notice or about any aspect of our data management, please contact us on hello@hopeguardians.com

We’ll update this privacy notice regularly to ensure it continues to comply with the latest regulations and best practice. This privacy notice was last amended on 06 July 2021.

2. How we use your information

a) Storage and management of personal information (provided by potential clients)

All personal information provided is only received by the core team at Hope Guardians, who in turn log the information provided on a database sheet, and use the information only to contact said person and best match them with a therapist.

Minimal information is shared with the therapist matched to the client, all information shared between the therapist and client is between them only.

No personal information provided by potential clients is shared outside of Hope Guardians to any third party beneficiaries.

b) Storage and management of personal information (provided by potential therapists)

All personal information provided is only received by the core team at Hope Guardians, who in turn log the information provided on a database sheet, and share the relevant information and certificates/documents provided with the team responsible for checking and vetting all applications.

We carefully safeguard the information we hold about therapists. This information comes from the way therapists engage with us, information provided through application forms.

c) Visitors to our website and social media platforms

When someone visits our website, we use a third-party service, Google Analytics, to collect standard internet log information and details of visitor behaviour patterns. We do this to find out things such as the number of visitors to the various parts of the site. This information is only processed in a way that does not identify anyone. We do not make, and do not allow Google to make, any attempt to find out the identities of those visiting our website.

We use Google Analytics so that we can continually improve our service to you – read the Google Analytics privacy notice.

Like most websites we use cookies to help the site work more efficiently.

If you fill in a form on our website, that data will be stored on the web host server before being sent to us.

Where we provide links to websites of other organisations, this privacy notice does not cover how that organisation processes personal information. We encourage you to read the privacy notices on the other websites you visit.

HOPEguardians has a presence on various social media platforms. If you engage with us via these platforms we will not usually collect or store your personal data. Where we are collecting personal data for future use, we will let you know and provide you with details about the intended use. We have a presence on Facebook and Instagram. To find out how these companies use your data and how you can control the way they use your data please refer to their privacy policies, which should be available on their websites.

What the information is used for

We ultimately collect this information to provide a service to clients. All information requested is required to ultimately match a therapist with a client in need of help.

We also use therapist information for identity verification and to comply with regulatory functions.

Specifically, we may use therapist information to:

• carry out regulatory checks and meet our obligations to the Professional Standards Authority
• improve the relevance of messages we may send you
• protect our systems

We will keep records of purchases for financial audit reasons for six years, we’ll also keep records of qualifications, complaints and adjudications for six years.

We will not pass on your information to a third party to use in their own direct marketing without your consent.

Sharing your information

During your contact with us, we’ll tell you how your information will be used and that it may be necessary to share it with other services and organisations.

We will not share your information with any third parties unless:

• you have consented to this (for example by providing information to us after we’ve told you that we will supply the information to a third party)
• it is required for a legitimate business purpose
• it is as part of our duty to protect a child, a vulnerable adult, yourself or the public
• for the prevention and detection of a crime or the assessment of any tax or duty
• we are required to do so by any court or law or any relevant regulatory authority
• to protect the rights, property or safety of HOPEguardians or any third parties (for example for the purposes of fraud protection)
• we transfer our rights and duties to provide products and services to another organisation

By being a therapist or client with HOPEguardians and using our products and services, you grant us permission to process personal data with which you have provided us.

When people make complaints against therapists or cients, we hold data relating to the complainant as well as details of the complaint and witnesses or interested parties. We share information with panel members and external clerks who all sign data processor agreements with us. All data relating to this process is kept securely.

d) Members of the public who make enquiries or complaints

We may record or process data from members of the public who call us with general enquiries, please refer to the section below about phone calls.

We retain general queries via email from the general public for a maximum of one year.

If a member of the general public contacts us to make a complaint about a therapist or about HOPEguardians, we will need to record personal data (and often sensitive personal data) in order to investigate the complaint. We may also need to share this information with various third parties (e.g. parties engaged by HOPEguardians to assist with the complaint). This information will be held for six years to defend against any potential legal claims.

e) Job applicants, current and former staff

We will only use any information you provide during the recruitment process for the purpose of progressing your application, or to fulfil legal or regulatory requirements if necessary.

We will not share any information you provide during the process with any third parties for marketing purposes. The information you provide will be held securely by us or our data processors, whether the information is in electronic or physical format.

We may use third parties to help us find the right candidates. This includes online hiring websites and in person Human Resource recruiters.

We will use the contact details you provide to contact you to progress your application. We will use the other information you provide to assess your suitability for the role you’ve applied for. You don’t have to provide what we ask for, but it might affect your application if you don’t.

We do not collect more information than we need to fulfil our stated purposes and will not retain it for longer than is necessary (this is currently a six-month period for unsuccessful candidates).

If we make a conditional offer of employment, we’ll ask you for information so that we can carry out pre-employment checks. You must successfully complete pre-employment checks to progress to a final offer. We are required to confirm the identity of our staff and their right to work in South Africa  or the UK, and to seek assurance as to their trustworthiness, integrity and reliability.

Therefore, you must provide:

• proof of your identity – we’ll ask you for original documents and will take copies
• proof of your qualifications – we may ask you for original documents and will take copies

We will contact your referees, using the details you provide in your application, directly to obtain references.

If we make a final offer, we’ll also ask you for the following:

• bank details – to process salary payments
• emergency contact details – so we know who to contact if you have an emergency at work

If you accept a final offer from us, some of your personnel records will be held on our internal HR records system.

During your employment we may need to share your information with third party processors who provide elements of our ongoing employment service, that is employment law advice, occupational health advice, payroll and pensions processing and other employee benefits such as health and wellbeing services. We have contracts in place with all of our third party processors. This means we have restricted what they can use your information for and who they can share it with. They hold it securely and retain it for the period we instruct.

The information you provide will be retained as part of your employee file for the duration of your employment and for six years afterwards. Please be aware that some information may be kept for longer if there is a legal reason to do so.

Volunteers

On occasion we use Reach Volunteering to manage volunteer recruitment – see the Reach Volunteering privacy notice. 

Volunteers carry out various roles at HOPEGuardians, such as being a trustee, serving on an executive committee, writing our online content, participating in our campaigns and projects or acting as an expert point of contact. We collect only information that we need for volunteers. Information is retained for the duration of their volunteering and only retained for longer if we have a legitimate reason to do so.

We do not collect more information than we need to fulfil our stated purposes and will not retain it for longer than is necessary. We will use the contact details you provide as a volunteer to contact you during your association with us. We will use the other information you provide to assess your suitability for the role you’ve applied for, including a declaration of interests.

All HOPEguardians volunteers are made aware of their data protection responsibilities before handling any personal data.

We also use volunteers as media spokespeople. We maintain lists of these volunteers for as long as they agree to speak to media outlets on our behalf.

f) Bulk emails

We use a third-party (Mailchimp) to send bulk emails to those who have opted in to our mailing list, or to a particular audience (therapists, clients or contacts). Mailchimp is based in the US and will have access to the information used to process these emails, including email addresses and the content of emails. Mailchimp have their own Privacy Policy in place to protect the data shared, please refer to their Privacy Policy for further reading. 

Should you ever wish to unsubscribe from these bulk emails please contact us directly on hello@hopeguardians.com 

3. Audit and regulatory requirements

We may share any data about our operations with:

• HMRC – see the HMRC personal information charter
• the Charity Commission – see the Charity Commission personal information charter
• the Information Commissioner’s Office – see the ICO privacy notice
• Companies House – see the Companies House personal information charter

and other regulatory bodies, should this be necessary to complete our statutory audit and regulatory requirements.

We use several law firms to provide advice and guidance on a range of topics and we may share personal data with them at times. We ensure that we have appropriate data protection agreements with them.

4. Complaints and queries

We try to meet the highest standards when collecting and using personal information, and we take any complaints about this very seriously. We encourage you to let us know if you think that our collection or use of information is unfair, misleading or inappropriate. We also welcome any suggestions for improving our procedures.

This privacy notice does not provide exhaustive details of all aspects of our collection and use of personal information. However, we’re happy to provide any additional information or explanation needed. Please send any requests for this to our Founder – ben@hopeguardians.com.

If you want to make a complaint about the way we’ve processed your personal information, you are encouraged to first reach out to us directly, and if your complaint is not addressed, you can contact the ICO (if UK-based) as the statutory body which oversees data protection law – see ICO concerns, or you can lodge a POPIA complaint (if RSA-based) with the Information Regulator about POPIA by emailing them

5. Your rights

Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 2018), you have rights as a data subject which you can exercise in relation to the information we hold about you. You can read more about these rights on the ICO’s website.

Under the South African …….. , you have rights as a data subject which you can exercise in relation to the information we hold about you. You can read more about these rights on the …….

Access to your information

We try to be as open as we can in terms of giving people access to their personal information. You can find out if we hold any personal information about you by making a ‘subject access request’ under the UK GDPR or South African POPI Act. If we do hold information about you, we will:

• give you a description of it
• tell you why we are holding it
• tell you who it could be disclosed to
• let you have a copy of the information in an intelligible form

If you agree, we’ll try to deal with your request informally, for example by providing you with the specific information you need over the telephone.

Please be aware that we may withhold information from you or provide you with redacted documents in line with exemptions in appropriate legislation.

Records of treatment

If you have received therapy from a therapist matched to you by us and require access to information about your treatment or the treatment someone else has received, you will need to contact the appropriate therapist directly.

Correcting mistakes

You can ask us to correct any mistakes in any factual information we hold about you, such as your address, date of birth, contact details etc.

Erasure

The UK GDPR and South African POPI Act also gives you the right to have the data we hold about you deleted in some circumstances. This is called the ‘right to erasure’ or the ‘right to be forgotten’. The right applies in the following circumstances:

• we no longer need your data
• you originally provided consent and have now withdrawn consent
• you have objected to the use of your data and your interests outweigh ours
• we have collected your data unlawfully
• we have a legal obligation to erase your data

Please be aware that we are unlikely to delete financial transactional data, or any conduct related information that is being retained in the public interest.

Making a request

If you would like to exercise your above rights, please contact our Data Protection Lead at hello@hopeguardians.com with details of your request. Please note that details of your request, correspondence and a copy of any information disclosed will be held by HOPEguardians, this information will be used as evidence we have met our legal obligations.

6. Disclosure of personal information

In many circumstances we will not disclose personal data without consent, but there are circumstances where we might do so. The list below provides some scenarios in which we may disclose personal data. Please be aware that this is not a complete list but serves as an example.

• When we investigate a complaint, we’ll need to share personal information with the individuals or organisations involved.
• We may share data with other regulatory bodies or associations that you (a therapist) is a member of.
• During our applications process, or any assessments we undertake, we collect personal data about individuals. If we are concerned about unsafe practice, we may share that data internally within HOPEguardians so appropriate action can be taken.
• We will share personal data with external legal professionals if we need legal advice.
• We may share personal data with law enforcement agencies or government departments where appropriate.

We will only share information that we consider to be necessary and proportionate.

7. Data security

We recognise that the information you provide may be sensitive and we will respect your privacy. This means we store it securely and control who has access to it. We sometimes share personal data with third parties where we have contracted them to carry out specific tasks for us. In such cases we carefully select which partners we work with. We take great care to ensure that we have a contract with the third party that states what they are allowed to do with the data we share with them.

We will only share personal data with other organisations where we are satisfied that the other organisation is entitled to receive it. Where relevant, we carry out due diligence checks on other organisations and ensure we have appropriate data protection agreements in place.

We’re committed to holding all personal data within HOPEguardians on secure systems. We keep any paper-based personal data in locked cabinets to which only appropriate staff have access. We’re working to reduce the amount of paper-based information we hold as it is easier to secure data if it is only held electronically. The majority of personal data is held electronically on our CRM system that is hosted by Microsoft.    

Cookies

Like most websites, we use cookies to help make our website work and to give you the best possible experience.

What are cookies?

Cookies are small text files that are saved on your computer, tablet or mobile phone. We use cookies to store information about how you use our website and to remember any preferences you set.

We use two types of cookies:

Necessary cookies

These are cookies that are required to make our website work properly. 

You can turn these cookies off by changing your browser settings. You can usually find the cookies options in the Settings menu for your browser (Chrome, Edge, Safari etc). Turning off necessary cookies may affect how well this and other websites work.

Analytics cookies

We use analytic tools to collect information about how you use our website, such as what pages you visit, how you got there and what you click on. These cookies do not collect or store any personal information and cannot be used to identify you individually.

We use this information to help us improve the site and ensure that it meets the needs of members and other users.

You can turn analytics cookies on and off from our cookies control panel – click on the cog at the bottom left of the screen.

Hope Guardians’s policies are subject to review and can be amended at any time. It is important that you regularly review these documents.