Terms of Use

Agreeing to these terms

By using this website or taking part in a RootED futures program, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree with them, please do not use the site. If you are under 18, please read these terms with a parent, guardian, or teacher.

RootED futures is an unincorporated, student-run association. It is not yet incorporated and does not yet hold 501(c)(3) status.

What we offer

Everything we provide — lessons, presentations, mentorship sessions, chapter events, the podcast, and entry to the startup competition — is free. There is no fee to participate in anything we run, and we will never ask you to pay for access to our materials.

We are a volunteer organisation of students. We may change, pause, or discontinue any part of our programs, and we may correct or update lesson materials at any time. We try to give notice when a change affects something you have signed up for, but we cannot guarantee that any program will run on a particular date or at all.

How to use the site

Use our site and programs in good faith. Please do not:

• Break the law, or use our programs to harm, harass, bully, or impersonate anyone.
• Attempt to gain unauthorised access to our systems, records, or accounts.
• Scrape, copy, or republish our materials at scale, or resell them.
• Submit work to the competition that is not yours, or misrepresent who is on your team.
• Disrupt lessons, events, or mentorship sessions for other participants.

We may remove a participant from a program, or decline a competition entry, where these rules are broken. Because we work with minors in partner schools, we take conduct seriously and will involve the relevant school where appropriate.

Your work stays yours

This matters more than anything else on this page, so we will be unambiguous about it: if you enter our startup competition, you keep every right to your idea, your venture, and the materials you submit. RootED futures takes no ownership and no equity in anything you build. Ever.

By entering, you give us a limited, non-exclusive licence to do only the following: show your submission to our judges for scoring, display your team name, school, and submitted materials on this website and our social channels to announce and celebrate results, and reference your participation in aggregate impact reporting to schools and sponsors. Nothing else.

If you would rather we did not publish your name, your school, or your materials after the competition, tell us and we will not. Winning is not conditional on agreeing to publicity. If you send us feedback or suggestions about our programs, we may act on them freely and without owing you anything, but we will not attribute them to you without asking.

The startup competition

Entry, eligibility, deadlines, judging criteria, and prizes for each season are set out on the competition page, and those season rules apply alongside these terms. Where the two conflict, the season rules govern for that competition.

Prizes are awarded at the judges' discretion and their decisions are final. Cash prizes are paid by Zelle or PayPal, and in-kind prizes such as software credits are provided by our sponsors on their own terms. If you are under 18, we may need to arrange payment through a parent or guardian, since these payment services generally require account holders to be adults. We may substitute a prize of equivalent value if a sponsor withdraws.

Our materials

Our lessons, presentations, written content, brand name, and logo belong to RootED futures and the people who created them. You are welcome to use our lesson materials to learn, to teach a class, or to run a chapter — that is what they are for. Please do not sell them, present them as your own, or use our name or logo in a way that suggests we endorse or are affiliated with you when we are not.

If you would like to use our materials in a school or program that is not a RootED futures chapter, just ask us. The answer is usually yes.

Third-party services and links

We use Google Forms and Slides, Calendly, YouTube, and Spotify to deliver parts of our programs, and we link to other organisations' sites. We do not control those services and are not responsible for their content, availability, or practices. A link from us is not an endorsement.

What we can and cannot promise

Our materials are educational. They are not professional business, legal, financial, tax, or investment advice, and mentorship conversations are guidance from volunteers rather than professional consultancy. Before making a real decision about a real business, talk to a qualified professional.

We provide the site and our programs as they are. We work hard to keep our content accurate and our site available, but we cannot promise either will be uninterrupted or error-free. To the extent the law allows, RootED futures, its volunteers, and its chapter leads are not liable for indirect or consequential loss arising from your use of the site or participation in our programs. Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded — and nothing here affects the statutory rights you have as a consumer.

If something goes wrong

If you have a problem with us, please just tell us first at team@root-edfutures.com. We are a student organisation and we would far rather fix something than argue about it. We aim to reply within 2–5 business days.

We have deliberately chosen not to include forced arbitration, a class-action waiver, or a jury-trial waiver in these terms. Those clauses are common but they exist to protect companies from the people they serve, and that is not the relationship we want with our students.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Illinois, United States, where our home chapter is based, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. If you are a consumer in the UK, the EEA, or another jurisdiction whose law gives you the right to bring proceedings locally, that right is unaffected.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as our programs develop or once we incorporate. The date at the top of this page shows when they last changed, and continuing to use the site after that date means you accept the updated version.

Contact us

Questions about these terms: email team@root-edfutures.com.