Legal
Privacy Policy
What information RootED futures collects from students, mentors, and partners, why we collect it, and how you can have it corrected or deleted.
Who we are
RootED futures is an international, student-run educational nonprofit. We provide free entrepreneurship lessons, mentorship, citywide chapters, a podcast, and an annual high school startup competition. This policy explains what we do with personal information we collect through this website, our programs, and the forms we ask you to fill in.
RootED futures is not yet incorporated and does not yet hold 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status; we intend to apply during the 2026–2027 fiscal year. We currently operate as an unincorporated association run by student volunteers, coordinated from our home chapter in Chicago, Illinois, United States. For the purposes of the UK and EU General Data Protection Regulation, RootED futures is the controller of the personal information described here.
We do not have a public postal address. The fastest way to reach us about anything in this policy — including a request to delete your information — is team@root-edfutures.com. We aim to reply within 2–5 business days.
Information we collect
We collect very little, and only what you give us directly. This website itself collects nothing: it sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and embeds no third-party scripts or trackers.
Everything we hold comes from a form you chose to fill in:
- Contact details
- Your name and email address, and sometimes your school, city, and grade level, when you register for a program, join or start a chapter, apply to mentor, or apply to the board.
- Programme records
- Attendance at lessons and events, and participation records for our chapters, so we can report honestly on how many students we reach.
- Competition entries
- Your team name, school, and the pitch deck, slides, or written materials you submit to the startup competition, along with judging notes and scores.
- Feedback
- Survey answers and comments you send us about lessons, mentorship, or events. You can always leave these blank or answer anonymously.
- Prize payment details
- For competition winners only: the email address or phone number linked to a Zelle or PayPal account, so we can send prize money. We ask for this only after you have won, we use it once, and we delete it after payment clears.
We do not ask for and do not want sensitive information — government ID numbers, financial account numbers, health information, or anything about race, religion, political opinions, or sexual orientation. Please do not send it to us. If you do, we will delete it.
How and why we use it
We use personal information for these purposes, and no others. Where UK or EU data protection law applies, the legal basis for each is given in brackets.
- Running our programs
- Enrolling you in lessons, scheduling mentorship sessions, organising chapter events, and administering the startup competition including judging and prizes. [Contractual necessity, or legitimate interests in delivering free education.]
- Talking to you
- Replying to you, confirming a registration, sending deadline reminders for a program you signed up for, and telling you the results of a competition you entered. [Contractual necessity, or legitimate interests.]
- Measuring our impact
- Counting students reached, chapters active, and sessions delivered, so we can report accurately to partner schools and prospective sponsors. Impact figures we publish are always aggregated and never identify an individual. [Legitimate interests in demonstrating our work.]
- Improving what we teach
- Reading your feedback and adjusting lessons and events. [Legitimate interests, or consent where you volunteered the feedback.]
- Paying prizes
- Sending prize money to competition winners and arranging in-kind awards such as sponsor-donated software credits. [Contractual necessity.]
To be explicit about what we do not do:
- We do not sell or rent your personal information, and never have.
- We do not share it with advertisers or use it for targeted advertising.
- We do not use it to train AI or machine learning models.
- We do not use it for automated decision-making or profiling.
- We do not send marketing emails to people who did not register with us. If you gave us your email when you signed up, we may email you about our programs; every such email has an unsubscribe link, and you can opt out at any time by replying or writing to us.
Students under 18, and students under 13
Our programs are built for middle and high school students, so most of the people we work with are minors. We want to be straightforward about that rather than hide behind the usual language saying a service is not intended for under-18s. Ours is.
Most of our teaching happens inside partner schools. Chapters run as student-led clubs in classrooms and libraries with the approval of the school and under the oversight of teachers or administrators. In that setting, the school authorises the collection of the limited information described above for an educational purpose, and the supervising adults can see the records for their own students.
Where a student registers directly through one of our online forms rather than through a school, we do not currently ask for or verify parental consent. We collect only a name and an email address in that case. We are reviewing this practice, and if you are a parent or guardian who would prefer we hold nothing about your child, write to us and we will delete it — no explanation needed.
For parents and guardians, at any time you can:
- Ask what information we hold about your child.
- Ask us to correct anything that is wrong.
- Ask us to delete it entirely, including from our records and any backup copies we control.
- Ask us to stop emailing your child.
Write to team@root-edfutures.com and we will act on it within 2–5 business days. We will never require a parent or guardian to create an account or pay anything to make one of these requests.
How long we keep it
We keep personal information only as long as it is useful for the purpose we collected it for:
- Prize payment details: deleted once the payment has cleared.
- Competition entries and judging notes: kept for the season they were submitted in and the following season, so we can answer questions about results, then deleted or anonymised.
- Registration and attendance records: kept while you are involved in our programs and for up to two years afterwards, so year-on-year impact figures stay accurate.
- Feedback: anonymised once we have acted on it.
- Aggregate impact numbers — for example 'students reached' — contain no personal information and are kept indefinitely.
How we protect it
We keep records in access-controlled Google accounts, limit access to the leadership members who need it, and require two-factor authentication on the accounts that hold them. This website is static, stores nothing about you, and is served over HTTPS with a strict content security policy.
We are a volunteer student organisation, not a security company, and no method of storing information online is completely safe. We will not claim otherwise. If we ever discover a breach affecting your information, we will tell affected people and the relevant authorities as the law requires.
International transfers
We are coordinated from the United States and our service providers are largely US-based, but our chapters and partner schools span several countries. If you are outside the United States, the information you give us will be transferred to and processed there.
The United States is not covered by a UK or EU adequacy decision, which means its legal protections are not automatically considered equivalent to those in Europe. Where we transfer information from Europe, we rely on our providers' standard contractual clauses, or on your explicit consent. You can ask us which mechanism applies to you.
Your rights
Wherever you live, you can ask us to:
- Tell you what personal information we hold about you.
- Give you a copy of it in a portable format.
- Correct anything inaccurate.
- Delete it.
- Stop emailing you.
If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, you also have the right to object to processing we carry out on the basis of legitimate interests, to ask us to restrict processing while a dispute is resolved, and to withdraw consent at any time where we relied on it — withdrawing consent does not affect processing that already happened.
To exercise any of these, email team@root-edfutures.com. We do not charge for this and we will not make it difficult. We may ask you to confirm your identity so we do not hand your information to someone else. If you are unhappy with how we respond, you can complain to your national data protection authority — in the UK that is the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk. If you are in California or another US state with a comparable privacy law, you have equivalent rights to know, delete, and correct, and we will not treat you differently for using them.
Links to other sites
We link out to Google Forms and Slides, Calendly, YouTube, and Spotify. Once you follow one of those links you are on their service, under their privacy policy, and they may set cookies and track you in ways we do not. We are not responsible for what they do, and we would encourage you — genuinely — to read their policies.
Changes to this policy
We may update this policy as our programs change or once we incorporate. If we make a material change we will update the date at the top of this page and, where we hold your email because you registered with us, tell you directly.
Contact us
Questions about this policy, or a request about your information: email team@root-edfutures.com. We aim to reply within 2–5 business days.