Our Privacy Policy

Diversecities respects your privacy and recognizes the importance of protecting and securing your personal information. Our staff and volunteers have a professional obligation to keep confidential all information they receive while providing you with any assistance or services. Diversecities is committed to protecting all personal information under our control. This Privacy Policy outlines how we manage your personal information and safeguard your privacy.

What is Personal Information?

Personal information is any information about an identifiable individual.

What Personal Information Do We Collect?

We may collect your name, address and personal contact information, information about your finances including your sources and amount of income, your date of birth, and other information about you and your dependents. In the course of providing you with services we may collect or obtain additional personal information about you through other parties involved in your matter or through your documents. The information we collect when providing services will vary from case to case.

How Do We Use Your Personal Information?

We use your personal information to see if you qualify for our services, to help ensure we are avoiding conflicts of interest as far as possible, and to provide you with any referrals or other services. We also use your personal information to create reports for the organizations that fund our services and to evaluate our programs. All our funding reports use non-identifiable information. We do not disclose any information that could be used to identify you. We will never sell or otherwise provide any of your personal information to any other parties for marketing purposes.

Collecting Your Personal Information

Wherever possible, we collect your personal information directly from you. Sometimes, however, we may receive information about you from other sources such as a government agency, your doctor or your employer. We will first obtain your consent before we collect your personal information from other sources.

Your Consent

In most cases we will ask you for your consent to collect, use or disclose your personal information. Normally we ask for your consent in writing but in some circumstances we may accept your verbal consent. Sometimes your consent will be implied through your relationship or actions. For example, if you have asked us for assistance with a matter concerning your landlord and asked us to contact your landlord, your conduct implies that we are authorized to contact your landlord on your behalf to discuss your case.

Disclosure of Your Personal Information

In some certain situations, Diversecities may disclose your personal information to individuals outside of our organization:

When you have consented to the disclosure
When we are required by law, court order or professional regulatory body to do so
If we engage a third party to provide support services to us such as computer back-up services or file storage

Keeping our Records Accurate

We aim to keep our information about you as accurate as possible while you are an active client. If you would like to review or change the personal information you have supplied us with, please contact us at hi@diversecities.org.

Security of Your Personal Information

We use technology and policies to protect your personal information from unauthorized access and improper use and will update these measures as new technology becomes available, as appropriate. Diversecities takes reasonable precautions to ensure that your personal information is kept safe from loss, unauthorized access or disclosure. For example, some of the steps we take to protect your personal information include:

Securing our office space and physical premises against unauthorized entry
Restricting file access on a need to know basis only
Using technical safeguards such as security software and firewalls to prevent unauthorized computer access
Use of internal passwords to restrict access to computer files

The Use of Cookies

We may store some information on your computer (commonly known as a “cookie”) when you look at our Website. We are able to read these cookies for information purposes when you revisit our Website. The type of information may we collect as a result of a cookie being accepted by you is specific to your device and includes the IP address, the date and time your device visited the Website, what parts of our Website were looked at and whether the web pages requested were delivered successfully. This information is anonymous; it represents a computer rather than a person.

We may use the cookie information to improve our knowledge of the use of our Website and to enable us to be able to ascertain whether the Website is operating at an optimal level. This allows us to enhance our web offerings to you. You can erase or block this information by changing the settings on your device (please refer to your help screens or manuals). If you do erase or block this information you may not be able to utilize some features of the Website.

Access Your Personal Information

You may ask for access to any record containing your personal information we hold about you. Your right of access to your personal information is not absolute and Diversecities may deny access in some limited circumstances such as when disclosure:

Could reveal confidential information about others, and the personal information cannot be separated from the record;
Could reasonably be expected to threaten the life or security of another person
Where the information was created in the course of a formal dispute resolution process such as a negotiation with the lawyer for an opposing party

If we deny your access request, or refuse a request to correct information, we will explain why. If you wish to access a record containing your personal information, please contact us as hi@diversecities.org

Retention and Destruction

Diversecities will only retain your personal information for as long as it is reasonable to do so for business or legal purposes, or as required by legislation or regulatory bodies. Once the retention period for records containing personal information has expired, Diversecities will destroy those records.

Communicating With Us

Please be aware that email is not a secure way of communicating with us. Diversecities does not guarantee the confidentiality of any email transmissions and you should consider this when sending us personal or confidential information by email. Also, please be aware that viewing this website or contacting any staff or volunteers of Diversecities through this website, by email, telephone or fax does not mean that we are guaranteed to provide services for you.

Employment and Volunteer Inquiries

If you apply to Diversecities for employment or volunteer opportunities we need to consider your personal information as part of our review process. We normally retain information of candidates after a decision has been made, for one year unless you ask us not to retain the information. If we offer you the job and you accept it, or if you are successful at securing a volunteer position, the information will be retained in accordance with our procedure for employee and volunteer records.

Information Submitted to Other Websites

We cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of other websites even if:

You accessed the third party website using links from our Website; or
You linked to our Website from a third party website

We recommend that you check the privacy policy of each site you visit and contact the owner or operator of such website if you have any concerns or questions.

Will This Policy Change?

From time to time, we may make changes to this Privacy Policy. If we make any substantial changes to this Privacy Policy and the way in which we use your personal information we will post these changes on this page. Please check our Privacy Policy on a regular basis.