Privacy Policy

Northwest Haiti Community Development Alliance ("NHCDA," "we," "us," or "our") respects the privacy of people who visit our website, contact our organization, or express interest in supporting our charitable mission. This Policy explains the information we handle, why we use it, and how to contact us about privacy matters.

1. Information we collect

• Contact and partnership forms: your name, email address, the subject and content of your message and, for partnership inquiries, your organization, role, country, website and optional telephone number.
• Volunteer applications: your contact details (including an optional telephone number), city and country, areas of interest, availability, skills, languages, motivation, and any CV or document you choose to upload.
• Newsletter: your email address and preferred language. Your subscription only starts once you confirm it from the email we send you.
• Accounts: staff, Board members and volunteers who sign in have an account with their name, email address and password (protected by one-way hashing, so nobody, including NHCDA, can read it).
• Technical information: our hosting and security services process technical data such as IP addresses, browser details and timestamps. To prevent abuse of our forms, we keep only a scrambled (hashed) version of IP addresses, never the address itself.
• Donations, once online giving is active: donor contact details, amount, date, transaction reference and payment status, received from our donation platform. We never receive or store payment-card numbers.

Please do not send payment-card numbers, account passwords, medical records or other sensitive information through our forms or by ordinary email.

2. How we use information

We use information to respond to inquiries; review volunteer applications and partnership proposals; send the newsletter to people who asked for it; maintain organizational, financial and tax records; protect the security of our website; and comply with legal requirements. Every newsletter includes a link to unsubscribe.

3. Donation processing

NHCDA intends to use Zeffy as its primary donation platform, with PayPal as a possible additional option. When online giving is active, your payment is made directly on the provider's secure form, and the provider's own privacy notice and terms also apply. NHCDA receives the donor and transaction details needed for receipts, reconciliation and charitable recordkeeping.

4. Service providers

We use service providers to run our website and communications: website hosting (Vercel), database (Neon), file storage (Cloudflare), automated email (Resend), email hosting (Namecheap) and, once active, donation processing (Zeffy). These providers handle information only as needed to perform their services. We may also disclose information where required by law, to protect legal rights or the security of our website, or with your permission. NHCDA does not sell personal information, and does not authorize the sale of donor contact lists.

5. Cookies

Our website uses only cookies that it needs to work:

• a language cookie that remembers the language you chose (kept for up to one year);
• sign-in cookies for people who log in to an account (staff, Board members, volunteers).

We do not use analytics, advertising or tracking cookies. Our fonts are served from our own website. The project map loads map images from OpenStreetMap only when you choose to display it. Once online giving is active, the donation form is provided by Zeffy, which may set its own cookies.

6. Security and retention

NHCDA maintains reasonable safeguards appropriate to the information involved, including encrypted connections, restricted staff access by role, two-step sign-in for staff, and a record of administrative actions. No online system is completely secure.

We keep information only as long as reasonably necessary for our organizational purposes, financial and tax records, legal requirements and security needs. In particular:

• answered and spam contact messages are deleted after 12 months;
• newsletter sign-ups that are never confirmed are deleted after 30 days;
• volunteer applications that were not accepted or were withdrawn, with their documents, are deleted 12 months after their last update.

7. Children and beneficiary information

This website is intended for adults. Children should not submit information through our forms without the involvement of a parent or guardian. Identifiable photographs, stories and sensitive information about the people we serve are published only with documented consent, and never with a child's full name or exact location.

8. International operations

NHCDA is established in the United States and supports activities in Haiti. Authorized staff and our service providers may access or process information in more than one country.

9. Your privacy requests

To ask about the personal information you have provided, request a correction or deletion, unsubscribe, or raise a privacy concern, contact info@nhcda.org. We will respond in accordance with applicable law and our verification, security and record-keeping obligations.

10. Changes

We may update this Policy to reflect changes in our website, providers, operations or legal obligations. The date of the latest update appears at the top of this page.

11. Contact

Northwest Haiti Community Development Alliance (NHCDA) Washington DC, United States info@nhcda.org