Privacy policy
Adopt A Talmid, a project of Keren Olam Hachinuch (EIN 42-2265132).
We ask families for financial details most people would not share with anyone. This page explains what we collect, who can see it, and what we will never do with it. If anything here is unclear, contact us and we will answer.
What we collect
Account information. Your name, email address, password (stored as a secure hash), and account role — parent, donor, school, or administrator.
Family applications. Parent and guardian names, phone, address, town and area. Household status and composition. Your shul and your Rav. Occupation, taxable income, other income, and savings and investments. Anything you write in the notes for the committee. For each child: name, grade, school, full tuition, what you are billed, what you have paid, how many months you are billed over, and what your family is able to pay each month.
Documents you send us. A tax return, a tuition bill, a pay stub, a school balance statement, or anything else you upload. Nothing is required to apply — we ask only when the committee needs something. Once a child is funded and before the first payment leaves, we ask for a current statement from the school so the amount we send matches what is really owed.
School applications and portals. School name, EIN, enrollment, grade structure, tuition and fee schedules, what a place costs the school, staff contact details, and the billing and payment records of the students at that school who are in the program.
Donor activity. Name, email, phone, address, gift amounts and history, what you sponsored, and the details needed to issue a receipt. Card and bank details are handled by our payment processor, not stored by us.
Technical data. Application and server logs may record IP address, browser type, and request metadata, kept to operate and secure the site.
Where else your information comes from
Most of what we hold comes from you. Two exceptions worth naming:
Your child’s school. Naming your child’s school on the application is what lets us work with that school on your file, and we do not contact a school you have not named. The school confirms tuition, what you are billed, and what is still outstanding. Once a child is funded, the school also tells us whether the family is keeping up with the amount it committed to, and ongoing non-payment reported to us can pause the match. If a school’s figures do not look right to you, tell us and we will go back to them before anything changes.
Your Rav or the person who referred you. If we need to confirm something on an application, we may contact the Rav or reference you listed. We tell them only that your family has applied and ask what we need to ask. We do not share your income, your documents, or the amounts involved.
How we use it
Review applications and decide what a family needs. Set and track what the family pays, what the school absorbs, and what Adopt A Talmid contributes. Raise the amount set for a child and pay it to the school. Confirm payments arrived and reflect them on your account. Issue donation receipts and meet our tax and audit obligations as a charitable program. Contact you about your application, your account, or a payment. Keep the site secure and prevent fraud.
We do not sell, rent, or trade personal information, and we do not use it to market anything to you.
What appears on the public listings
Anyone can browse Opportunities at aatalmid.org/sponsor without signing in. A listing shows a code we generate, the general town or area, and how much is still needed to fund it.
A listing never shows a name, a photograph, an address, a school, a parent’s name, a grade, an income figure, or anything from a family’s documents or notes. Every listing is checked before it goes live.
There is no photo release or story release to sign, because nothing identifying is ever published in the first place — not publishing is the protection, not a form on file. Applying for assistance is understood as agreeing to be listed this way, within those limits, unless you tell us otherwise. If you would prefer that your child’s application not be listed at all, contact us and we will mark it; that instruction stays on the record and applies in later years too, so you do not need to repeat it each time you apply.
This binds us, not you. We could not later decide to use a name, a photograph, or an identifiable story on the strength of anything on file, because nothing identifying is ever collected for that purpose. It would take that family’s specific written permission, asked for at the time and for that purpose alone — and a family saying no would change nothing about their application or their funding.
Who can see your information
Designated administrators. A small number of staff and committee members, each with a login of their own. Full financial detail and uploaded documents are visible only to them.
Your child’s school. A school sees the students at its own school and only those students: the tuition and billing figures on the application, what each side has committed, and what has been paid. A school does not see your income, your savings, your uploaded documents, or your notes to the committee, and it cannot see any other family.
Donors. A donor can sponsor a specific child, and sees only what the listing shows — the code, town or area, and amount. Donors never see a child’s name, school, address, family financial information, or documents, before or after sponsoring.
Service providers. Each vendor sees only what it needs: payment processing (Stripe), transactional email (Resend), and hosting, database, and private document storage through established providers under contract, who process data only to run the service. We hold each provider to its own confidentiality and security obligations.
When the law requires it. If we are legally required to disclose something — a lawful subpoena, a tax authority, an audit — we will comply. Where we are permitted to tell you first, we will.
Payment information
Card and bank account numbers are handled by our payment processor, Stripe, and are not stored on our systems. When you save a payment method, Stripe holds it and gives us a token that stands in for it. We can see the last four digits and the card type, nothing more.
Documents and storage
Uploaded documents go to private storage that is not publicly reachable and is not indexed by search engines. Access requires an administrator login. Traffic to and from the site is encrypted, and passwords are stored hashed.
No system is perfect and we will not tell you ours is. If we ever learn that family information has been exposed, we will tell the affected families promptly and tell them what we know.
How long we keep things
Application and award records are kept while a family is in the program and for 7 years after, which is the period our accountants and auditors need. Donation records and receipts are kept for 7 years to meet tax requirements. Supporting documents such as tax returns and pay stubs are kept for 3 years after the application they relate to is closed, then deleted. Applications that are started but never submitted are deleted after 6 months.
Children's information
Assistance is for children in grades 3 through 8 at a partnering school. We collect information about children from their parents or guardians, never from the children themselves. Children do not have accounts and cannot sign in. Nothing on this site is directed at children.
Your choices
See what we hold. Ask us and we will tell you what is in your file.
Correct it. Edit your family profile at any time, and write to us about anything you cannot edit yourself.
Ask us to delete it. We will delete what we are able to. We cannot delete records we must keep for tax, audit, or accounting reasons, or the record of a payment already made to a school. We will tell you plainly what we removed and what we had to keep.
Ask us to take a listing down. Tell us and we will remove it. It will not affect your application or anything already raised.
Stop hearing from us. Every newsletter and appeal has an unsubscribe link. Messages about your application, your account, or a payment are not marketing and continue while your account is active.
Depending on where you live, your state may give you additional rights over your personal information. Write to us and we will honor them.
Cookies
We use session cookies to keep you signed in and to protect account pages. Payment pages may set additional cookies required by Stripe. You can control cookies in your browser, but disabling them will prevent signing in and completing a donation. We do not use advertising trackers.
Changes to this policy
If we change this policy in a way that affects what we do with information we already hold, we will update the date at the top and tell account holders by email before the change takes effect.
Contact
Adopt A Talmid — a project of Keren Olam Hachinuch
747 Chesnutridge Rd, Spring Valley, NY 10970
office@aatalmid.org · (845) 513-0599
If you have a concern about how your information has been handled, write to us first. We would rather hear it from you.
Last updated: September 2026.