Privacy policy

The volunteer portal is operated by Fair Food NZ, a registered charitable organisation (charity number CC48507), based at 624 Rosebank Road, Avondale, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. We are the agency responsible for the personal information you provide here, and we handle it in line with the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020 and its Information Privacy Principles.

We collect only what we need to run volunteering safely:

• Account details — your name and email address, and (depending on how you sign in) a hashed password, a link to your Google account, and/or registered passkeys. See “How you sign in” below.
• Volunteer profile — phone number, pronouns, date of birth, an emergency contact name and phone number, any access or support needs, and how you heard about us.
• Onboarding questionnaire — your reasons for volunteering and, so we can roster you safely and meet our duty of care, sensitive information you choose to disclose about relevant health conditions and any criminal or arrest history. This is treated as confidential and seen only by coordinators who need it.
• Activity — the shifts you book, cancel, and attend, and any notes a coordinator adds about a booking.
• Technical — a secure session cookie that keeps you signed in, and basic server logs (such as error records) used to keep the service working.

You can sign in with an email and password, with Google, or with a passkey:

• Google sign-in. If you choose “Continue with Google”, Google tells us your Google account’s unique identifier, your email address, whether Google has verified that email, and your name. We use this only to create or match your volunteer account. We do not receive your Google password and we request no access to any other Google data. Your use of Google is also subject to Google’s own privacy policy.
• Passkeys. A passkey stores a public key and a label you choose on our side; the private key never leaves your device. We cannot use it to access anything else on your device.
• Passwords. Passwords are stored only as a salted one-way hash — we never store or can see the original.

We use your information to:

• create and secure your account and keep you signed in;
• roster you onto shifts, manage attendance, and contact you about your bookings (for example a reminder the day before);
• keep volunteers and the people we serve safe, including reviewing the safeguarding information in your questionnaire;
• send essential transactional emails — sign-in verification, password resets, and booking-related messages;
• meet our legal, health-and-safety, and reporting obligations as a charity.

We do not use your information for advertising, and we do not sell it or trade it.

Your information is seen by Fair Food coordinators who need it to roster and look after volunteers. We also rely on a small number of service providers who process information on our behalf:

• Google — for the optional “Continue with Google” sign-in.
• Resend — to deliver our transactional emails.
• Squarespace — the platform our website and volunteer newsletter run on. From time to time we add volunteers’ names and email addresses to Squarespace so we can send our monthly volunteer newsletter and run volunteer reports. You can unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time using the link in any newsletter email.
• Our hosting and storage providers — who run the servers and file storage the portal operates on.

These providers may process information outside New Zealand. We share information with them only as needed to run the portal and keep volunteers informed, and otherwise disclose personal information only where the law requires or allows it (for example a serious safety concern).

We keep your account and volunteer information for as long as you are an active or returning volunteer, and afterwards only for as long as we need it to meet legal, safety, and reporting obligations. You can ask us to delete your account at any time (see below); some records may be retained where the law requires.

Access is restricted to authenticated users and authorised coordinators. Passwords are hashed, sign-in and reset links are single-use and time-limited, sessions use a secure HTTP-only cookie, and connections are encrypted in transit. No system is perfectly secure, but we take reasonable steps to protect your information and review them as the service changes.

Under the Privacy Act 2020 you can ask to see the personal information we hold about you and request that we correct it. Much of it you can view and update yourself on your profile and sign-in & security pages. To request access, correction, or deletion, contact us using the details below. If you are not satisfied with how we have handled your information, you can raise it with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.

We may update this policy as the portal evolves. We will change the “last updated” date above, and for significant changes we’ll let signed-in volunteers know.

For any privacy question or request, email volunteering@fairfood.org.nz, or write to us at Fair Food NZ, 624 Rosebank Road, Avondale, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.