Volunteer Privacy Policy

FoodCycle collects and processes a range of information about you. This includes:

• your name, address and contact details, including email address and telephone number;
• your nationality and information about your entitlement to volunteer in the UK;
• the details of your volunteering agreement including start date;
• details of your qualifications, skills, experience and employment history, including start and end dates, with previous employers and with the organisation;
• an assessment of your suitability for the activity you are volunteering to do;
• details of your bank/building society account for the reimbursement of expenses;
• information about your next of kin and emergency contacts;
• information about your eligibility to drive and any associated insurance or MOT details for your vehicle;
• information about your criminal record;
• details of any safeguarding incidents in which you have been involved;
• details of your availability for volunteering and attendance;
• information regarding special requirements, health or medical conditions;
• information regarding any training you receive;
• equal opportunities monitoring information, including information about your ethnic origin, sexual orientation, health and religion or belief;
• Your marketing preferences in regards to volunteer newsletters, and marketing e-mails about campaigns and fundraising events from FoodCycle; and
• Photo consent information.

FoodCycle may collect this information in a variety of ways. For example, data might be collected through volunteer application forms, CVs or resumes; obtained from your passport or other identity documents such as your driving licence; from forms completed by you at the start of or during volunteering (such as contact detail forms); from correspondence with you; or through interviews, meetings or other assessments.

In some cases, FoodCycle may collect personal data about you from third parties, such as references from previous employers or organisations who have engaged you as a volunteer and information from criminal records checks permitted by law.

Data will be stored in a range of different places, including in your volunteering file, in FoodCycle’s volunteering management systems and in other IT systems (including the organisation’s email system).

Your personal data will be processed to enable FoodCycle to enter into a volunteer agreement with you.

FoodCycle also needs to process data to ensure that it is complying with its legal obligations. For example to comply with health and safety laws.

In other cases, FoodCycle may have a legitimate interest in processing personal data before, during and after the end of the volunteering relationship.

Processing volunteer data allows FoodCycle to:

• run volunteer recruitment and appointment processes;
• assess the suitability of individuals for volunteering activities;
• maintain accurate and up-to-date volunteer records and contact details (including details of who to contact in the event of an emergency);
• obtain appropriate legal or HR advice, to ensure that it interprets and complies with duties in relation to legislation and its own policies, processes and procedures in a fair and reasonable manner;
• ensure that volunteers are receiving appropriate reimbursement of expenses;
• ensure it meets its obligations under health and safety law including assessments of risk;
• comply with requirements of funders;
• ensure effective general business administration;
• respond to and defend against legal claims; and
• maintain and promote equality in the workplace.

Where FoodCycle processes other special categories of personal data, such as information about ethnic origin, sexual orientation, health or religion or belief, this is done for the purposes of equal opportunities monitoring.

We do not need your consent if we use special categories of personal data in order to carry out our legal obligations.

In some circumstances however we may ask for your consent to allow us to process certain particularly sensitive data. In these circumstances we will provide you with sufficient information about how your data will be used for you to make a choice about whether to provide your consent. You will have full control over your decision to give or withhold consent, and there will be no consequences where consent is withheld. Consent, once given, may be withdrawn at any time, with no consequences.

Your data will be shared with colleagues within FoodCycle where it is necessary for them to undertake their duties. This includes, for example, relevant managers for the purposes of supervision, the HR department/representative for maintaining personnel records, payroll for administering payment under your contract of employment, Volunteer Project Leaders connected to the Project  in which you volunteer and IT staff.

FoodCycle shares your data with third parties in order to obtain references from other organisations and obtain necessary criminal records checks from the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS).

FoodCycle also shares your data with third parties that process data on its behalf in connection with HR services. These arrangements are also governed by a duty of confidentiality.

FoodCycle may be required to share your data with third parties such as the local authority, police, courts and statutory agencies, the DBS and Department of Work and Pensions to comply with legal obligations.

FoodCycle will not share your data with third parties for any other purpose without your express consent.

HR related personal data may, in specified circumstances be lawfully transferred to countries outside the EEA by FoodCycle for the purpose of processing volunteer data. One such set of circumstances may be personal data that is transferred to data processor/data controllers in the US on the basis of Binding Corporate Rules, EU-US Privacy Shield certification and/or ISO certification.  FoodCycle uses all reasonable endeavours to verify that the commercial arrangements it has in place with any US-based entities offer the appropriate rights and safeguards to data subjects in respect of their personal data. 

FoodCycle takes the security of your data seriously. FoodCycle has internal policies and controls in place to try to ensure that your data is not lost, accidentally destroyed, misused or disclosed, and is not accessed except by our employees in the performance of their duties. Such controls include:

• The protection of laptops and FoodCycle mobile telephones with virus protection, encryption and password protection
• Restriction of the finance system, Sage, to the Finance Manager, Head of Programmes and CEO
• Use of encrypted and password protection website, with double verification, for the storage of volunteer information
• A range of safeguards within our electronic employee data system, including password protection and tiered access rights.

Where FoodCycle engages third parties to process personal data on its behalf, they do so on the basis of written instructions, are under a duty of confidentiality and are obliged to implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure the security of data. 

In line with data protection principles, we only keep your data for as long as we need it for, which will be at least for the duration of you volunteering with us.

In some cases, we will keep your data for a period after your volunteering relationship has ended. Retention periods can vary depending on why we need your data. This may be determined by law.  The periods for which your data is held after the end of volunteering are set out in our Data Protection Policy. 

Volunteering decisions are not based solely on automated decision-making. 

As a data subject, you have a number of rights. These are:

• the right to be informed. This means that we must tell you how we use your data, and this is the purpose of this privacy notice;
• the right of access. You have the right to access the data that we hold on you and to receive a copy of your data and information about where it was sourced. To do so, you should make a subject access request. You can read more about this in our Data Protection Policy which is available in our dropbox facility;
• the right for any inaccuracies to be corrected. If any data that we hold about you is incomplete or inaccurate, you are able to require us to correct it;
• the right to ask FoodCycle for your data to be erased, for example if you believe there is no longer any need for your data to be held for its original purpose, or if you decide to withdraw any consent that you have given for your data to be processed;
• the right to restrict the processing of the data. For example, if you believe the data we hold is incorrect, we will stop processing the data (whilst still holding it) until we have ensured that the data is correct;
• the right to portability. You may transfer the data that we hold on you to another organisation for your own purposes;
• you may have the right to object to the way we use your data if you do not agree that we are using it for our legitimate interests; and
• the right to regulate any automated decision-making and profiling of personal data. You have a right not to be subject to automated decision making in way that adversely affects your legal rights.

Where you have provided consent to our use of your data, you also have the unrestricted right to withdraw that consent at any time. Withdrawing your consent means that we will stop processing the data that you had previously given us consent to use. There will be no consequences for withdrawing your consent. However, in some cases, we may continue to use the data where so permitted by having a legitimate reason for doing so.

If you would like to exercise any of these rights, please contact Sophie Tebbetts, Head of Programmes, [email protected].

If you believe that FoodCycle has not complied with your data protection rights, you can complain to the Information Commissioner. Their contact details can be found on their website (www.ico.org.uk). 

You have some obligations under your volunteer’s agreement to provide FoodCycle with data.

Certain information, such as contact details, your entitlement to volunteer in the UK and DBS information have to be provided to enable FoodCycle to accept you as a volunteer. If you fail to provide certain information when requested, it may hinder FoodCycle’s ability to register you for volunteering opportunities, or prevent us from meeting our legal obligations (such as to ensure your health and safety).