Privacy Policy

1Who we are

Tyndale St-Georges Community Centre is a non-profit community organization serving Little Burgundy and the surrounding neighbourhoods of Montreal. In this policy, "we", "us" and "our" mean Tyndale St-Georges Community Centre.

We operate from two locations:

• 870 Richmond Square, Montreal, Quebec H3J 1V7 — 514 931-6265
• 753 rue des Seigneurs, Montreal, Quebec H3J 1Y2 — 514 931-6265 ext. 20

We have designated a Privacy Officer who is accountable for our handling of personal information and for responding to your requests and complaints.

2What this policy covers

This policy applies to personal information we collect through:

• our website at tyndalestgeorges.com, in both English and French;
• the AJFA Scholarship application portal at tyndalestgeorges.com/scholarship;
• registration for our programs and activities, whether online, on paper or in person;
• donations, our newsletter, our contact forms, and enquiries about employment or volunteering;
• photographs and video recorded at our sites and at our events.

It does not apply to organizations we link to or work alongside, each of which has its own privacy practices. See section 14.

3Information we collect

3.1Information you give us

What we collect depends on how you interact with us.

Where a field is required, we tell you so. You can always choose not to give us optional information, though some services may not be available without it.

3.2Children and youth

We run programs for children, youth and families, so we collect personal information about minors by design and as a normal part of our work.

Under Quebec law, personal information about a child under 14 may only be collected with the consent of a parent or the person having parental authority. A person aged 14 or over may consent on their own behalf, and a parent may also consent for them.

A parent or guardian registering a child is responsible for providing the consents the registration calls for, including consent to photography and video. A parent or guardian may ask us at any time to see, correct or delete the information we hold about their child, using the contact details in section 1.

3.3Photographs and video

We photograph and film our programs and events. Images of an identifiable person are personal information, and we treat them accordingly.

We use these images on our website, in our newsletter and annual reports, in printed materials, on our social media accounts, and in grant applications and funding reports. We collect them only where consent has been given — on the registration form for program participants, and by notice at the event for open community events.

You may withdraw media consent at any time by writing to our Privacy Officer. We will stop using the image going forward and remove it from our own website and social media accounts. We cannot always recover copies already printed, already shared by others, or held in archived materials, and we will tell you plainly where that is the case.

3.4Information collected automatically

When you visit our website we collect your IP address, browser type and version, operating system and device type, the pages you visit, the date and time of your visit, how long you spend on each page, and the site you arrived from. Our contact form also records the IP address of the sender, as a protection against spam and abuse.

This information is collected through cookies and similar technologies, described in section 6.

4Why we collect it

We use personal information only for the purposes set out below. If we ever want to use it for a new purpose, we will tell you and obtain your consent first.

• To deliver our programs and services — registering participants, running activities, and keeping participants safe.
• To communicate with you — answering your enquiries, confirming registrations, and sending service messages such as schedule changes or closures.
• To administer the AJFA Scholarship — verifying eligibility, evaluating applications, communicating with applicants, and awarding and administering scholarships.
• To process and acknowledge donations — issuing tax receipts as the Income Tax Act requires, and thanking donors.
• To send our newsletter — news about our programs, events and fundraising, and only to people who have asked to receive it.
• To recruit staff and volunteers — assessing applications and, where a role requires it, confirming suitability to work with children and vulnerable people.
• To report to our funders — in aggregate and anonymized form. We do not disclose the identity of individual participants in funding reports unless you have specifically consented.
• To understand and improve our website — through the aggregate statistics described in section 6.
• To meet our legal obligations — including charitable record-keeping, health and safety, and responding to lawful requests.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not rent, trade or otherwise make it available to third parties for their own marketing.

5Consent and how to withdraw it

We ask for your consent in clear language, separately for each purpose, at the moment we collect the information. Consent to something optional is never bundled with consent to something necessary: you can register a child for a program and decline photography, and we will honour that.

You may withdraw your consent at any time. Withdrawing consent does not affect anything we did lawfully beforehand, and in some cases it means we can no longer provide a service — we will tell you if that is so.

• Newsletter — use the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any newsletter, or write to us. We act on unsubscribe requests promptly and in any case within 10 business days.
• Photography and video — write to our Privacy Officer. See section 3.3.
• Website analytics — change your choice through the cookie settings on our website. See section 6.
• Anything else — write to our Privacy Officer using the details in section 1.

6Cookies and tracking

A cookie is a small file placed on your device by a website. Below is every cookie our website sets. Only the strictly necessary ones are active before you make a choice.

Measurement cookies are switched off by default. They are set only after you agree through the notice that appears on your first visit. You can change your choice at any time through the Cookie Settings link in the footer of every page, and if you turn measurement off we delete the Google Analytics cookies already on your device. Refusing them does not limit your use of the site in any way.

Our language choice is not stored in a cookie — the English and French sites are simply separate addresses, and the link in the menu moves you between them.

Our newsletter sign-up form is provided by Constant Contact and loads from their servers. It is not loaded with the page: it loads only if you have agreed to the cookies above, or at the moment you open the sign-up form. Our newsletters may contain a small image that tells us whether the newsletter was opened and which links were clicked, so we can tell whether our communications are useful. You can prevent this by setting your email program not to load remote images.

The video on our home page is embedded from YouTube in privacy-enhanced mode (youtube-nocookie.com): YouTube sets no cookies until you press play. If you play the video, YouTube, a Google service, may set cookies and collect information under its own privacy policy.

Our pages load their fonts from Google Fonts and, on the calendar pages, display code from jsDelivr. When your browser downloads these files, those services receive your IP address. They set no cookies.

Most browsers also let you refuse or delete cookies through their own settings. If you block strictly necessary cookies, parts of the site will not work.

7Who we share it with

We share personal information only where it is necessary, and only in the situations below.

7.1Service providers

We use a small number of outside suppliers to operate our services. Each is bound by a written agreement — either one we have signed with them, or the terms of service we accepted when we opened the account. Under those terms they may only use your information to perform the service we have asked for, must protect it, and may not use it for their own purposes. Your information remains under our control throughout: our suppliers hold it on our behalf, and owning the equipment it sits on gives them no claim to it.

7.2Scholarship selection

Applications are read by Tyndale St-Georges staff and by the members of the scholarship selection committee, who are bound to keep them confidential and who see them only for the purpose of selecting recipients.

7.3Legal and safety disclosures

We may disclose personal information without your consent where the law allows or requires it — in particular:

• to comply with a law, a subpoena, a warrant or a court order;
• to report a situation under the Youth Protection Act, where we have reasonable grounds to believe a child's security or development is in danger — a legal duty that applies to everyone;
• to prevent or reduce a serious risk of death or serious injury to a person or group;
• to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim.

7.4Change of organization

If Tyndale St-Georges merges with another organization, transfers its operations, or winds up, personal information may be transferred as part of that process. Any organization receiving it must protect it under terms at least equivalent to this policy, and we will give notice before any such transfer takes effect.

8Information held outside Quebec

Our website and the scholarship portal run on a dedicated server owned and operated by Perpetual Solution, the firm that builds and maintains our website for us. That server is located outside Quebec. Most of the personal information we hold electronically is therefore stored outside Quebec, including:

• scholarship applications, together with the transcripts and letters of reference uploaded to support them;
• messages sent to us through the contact forms on our website;
• messages sent to our staff by email, including applications for employment;
• the databases behind our website.

The server hosts other clients of Perpetual Solution. It is not a public shared-hosting service, and no organization unconnected with Perpetual Solution has an account on it. Our website, its databases, and the documents uploaded to the scholarship portal sit in a separate account of their own, apart from the other sites on the same machine.

Several of our service providers also process information outside Quebec, as set out in section 7.1.

Personal information held outside Quebec is subject to the laws of the place where it is held. It may be accessible to the courts, law enforcement and government authorities of that place under those laws — including, in some circumstances, where Quebec law would not permit such access, and without notice to you or to us.

Before entrusting personal information to a supplier outside Quebec, we assess whether it would receive protection equivalent to that required under Quebec law, taking into account the sensitivity of the information, the purposes it is used for, the safeguards in place and the legal framework of the destination. We record that assessment, and we put a written agreement in place with the supplier.

9How long we keep it

We keep personal information only as long as we need it for the purpose we collected it, or as long as the law requires. When the period ends, we destroy it or anonymize it.

Destroying a scholarship application does not destroy the record that a scholarship was awarded. That record lives in our financial and grant files, which we keep for as long as the law governing registered charities requires.

10How we protect it

We take reasonable measures to protect personal information against loss, theft and unauthorized access, disclosure, copying, use or modification. These include:

• encrypting information in transit between your browser and our website;
• limiting access to personal information to the staff and volunteers who need it to do their work;
• protecting the scholarship portal with one-time sign-in codes sent to a registered mobile number, and storing uploaded transcripts and reference letters outside the publicly reachable part of the website, where they can only be opened by a signed-in member of staff;
• keeping paper records in locked storage;
• keeping our website, its databases and the documents uploaded to the scholarship portal in a separate account on the server, apart from the other sites hosted on the same machine;
• relying on Perpetual Solution, under written agreement, to keep the server's operating system and software patched;
• reviewing our practices as our programs and systems change.

No method of transmitting or storing information is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If a privacy incident occurs, we act as described in section 12.

11Your rights

Quebec law gives you the following rights over the personal information we hold about you.

• Access — to be told whether we hold personal information about you, and to receive a copy of it.
• Correction — to have information that is inaccurate, incomplete or ambiguous corrected, and to have information collected without proper authority deleted.
• Withdrawal of consent — as described in section 5.
• Portability — to receive the computerized personal information you gave us in a structured, commonly used technological format, or to have us transmit it to another organization.
• De-indexing and cessation of dissemination — to ask us to stop disseminating personal information about you, or to de-index a link to it, where dissemination contravenes the law or a court order, or where it causes you serious injury to your reputation or privacy that clearly outweighs the public interest in the information. This is the right to use if a photograph of you or your child is still visible on our website or social media.
• Information about automated decisions — see section 13.

To exercise any of these rights, write to our Privacy Officer using the details in section 1. We may ask you to confirm your identity before we act, so that we do not disclose your information to someone else. We will respond within 30 days of receiving your request. Our response is free of charge, though we may charge a reasonable fee for transcription, reproduction or transmission, and we will tell you the amount before we proceed.

If we refuse a request in whole or in part, we will tell you in writing why, which provision of the law we rely on, that you may ask the Commission d'accès à l'information to review the decision, and how long you have to do so.

12Privacy incidents

A privacy incident means unauthorized access to, use or disclosure of personal information, its loss, or any other breach of its protection.

If an incident occurs, we take reasonable steps to reduce the harm and to prevent it happening again. Where the incident presents a risk of serious injury, we promptly notify both the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec and each person affected, and we tell affected people what they can do to reduce the risk to themselves. We keep a register of all privacy incidents, which we provide to the Commission on request.

13Automated decisions

We do not use personal information to make decisions about you based exclusively on automated processing. Scholarship applications, program registrations and hiring decisions are all reviewed and decided by people.

If this ever changes, we will tell you at the time of the decision, explain the personal information used and the reasons and main factors behind the decision, and give you the opportunity to submit observations to a member of our staff who can review it.

14Other websites

Our website links to other organizations, including our donation page at CanadaHelps, our program registration store at Amilia, our library catalogue at Libib, our funders and partner organizations, and our newsletter archive. When you follow a link you leave our site, and this policy no longer applies. We do not control those sites and are not responsible for their privacy practices. We encourage you to read the privacy policy of any site you visit.

15Changes to this policy

We review this policy periodically and may update it as our programs, systems or legal obligations change. When we do, we post the revised policy on this page and update the effective date at the top.

If a change materially affects how we use your personal information, we will give you notice — by email where we have your address, or by a prominent notice on our website — before the change takes effect. Where a change requires your consent, we will ask for it.

16Questions and complaints

If you have a question about this policy, want to exercise one of your rights, or wish to complain about how we have handled your personal information, please contact our Privacy Officer first. We take complaints seriously and will investigate and respond to you.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you may file a complaint with the provincial regulator, which oversees the protection of personal information in Quebec: