Privacy Policy

Last updated: November 01. 2026

Pahana Project is a small volunteer initiative working in Weligama, Mirissa and Ahangama, Sri Lanka. This policy explains what information we hold, why we hold it, and what you can ask us to do with it.

We hold two very different kinds of information: ordinary website and donation records, and information about the people we support. The second kind is far more sensitive, and we treat it differently.

Information about people we support

Information about participants — anything they tell a facilitator, their circumstances, their attendance, their progress — is held in confidence by the facilitator running their programme.

We record limited information with each participant's knowledge: their AUDIT scores, their occupation and its relationship to the tourism season, how their drinking patterns change across the year, which parts of their routine they keep, and the age at which they began drinking. This is kept separately from their name and is used only in aggregate.

We never publish anything that identifies a participant without their specific, written, freely given consent for that particular use.

Medical information. Participants are assessed by a doctor before joining. We hold only what we need to run the programme safely: whether someone is in the range we work with, and anything the doctor tells us to watch for. We do not hold medical records, and we do not pass what we hold to anyone else.

Participants in our individual programme are never named.

Where someone has consented to appear in a photograph or to have their story told, we use a pseudonym, and we say clearly that it is one. We do not publish their surname, their village, their workplace, their family circumstances, or any other detail that would narrow them down to one person. A pseudonym only protects someone if everything around it does too, and we treat the surrounding detail as part of the identification rather than as background.

We do not publish anything at all about participants
in our group programme.

Consent can be withdrawn at any time, for any reason,
without explanation.

If a participant asks us to remove a photograph, a story, or any other material, we remove it from this site and from our social media as soon as we are able. We will not ask them to justify the request, and withdrawing consent has no effect whatsoever on the support they receive from us.

We will not publish material about a participant while they are in an early or unstable stage of recovery, even if they have offered consent. People make decisions about visibility at moments when they are not best placed to judge the long-term consequences, and it is our responsibility, not theirs, to be careful about that.

We will tell any participant considering being identified that material published online cannot be reliably removed once it has been copied, cached, or indexed elsewhere, and that we cannot promise otherwise.

Information you give us

If you email us,

we hold your email address and the content of your message in a Gmail account controlled by the project.

If you use the contact form,

the information you enter is processed by Wix, which hosts this website, and reaches us by email.

If you donate,

our bank records show your name, the amount, and the date, because that is how bank transfers work. We keep a private ledger of donations for accounting purposes. We never publish donors' names unless a donor asks us to. Our public accounts show dates, amounts and purposes only.

If you apply to volunteer,

we hold what you send us for as long as your application is under consideration, and for up to twelve months afterwards in case a suitable role opens up. Tell us if you would prefer us to delete it sooner.

Information collected automatically

Wix collects standard analytics about visits to this site — pages viewed, approximate location, browser and device type. We use this only to understand whether anyone is reading what we publish. We do not use advertising trackers and we do not sell or share this data.

Wix's own privacy practices apply to information it processes on our behalf, and are set out at wix.com.

How long we keep things

Emails and contact form messages: [기간]
Donation records: seven years, or as long as required for accounting purposes
Volunteer applications: twelve months
Participant records: for the duration of a participant's involvement and [기간] afterwards, unless they ask us to delete them sooner

Who else sees your information

Nobody, other than the people running this project. We do not sell, rent, or share personal information with third parties. We use Wix to host this site and Google to handle email, and both process information on our behalf under their own terms.

The one exception is the one set out in Our Approach: if we believe someone's life or safety is at immediate risk, we may contact medical services or family. We explain this to every participant before they join.

Your Rights

You can ask us at any time to tell you what information we hold about you, correct anything that is wrong, delete what we hold, or stop contacting you.
Email pahanaproject@gmail.com and we will respond within [기간]. You do not need to give a reason.
If you are in the UK or the European Union, you have these rights under the UK GDPR and the EU GDPR respectively, and you may complain to your national data protection authority if you are not satisfied with our response.

Children

This website is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. Our programmes are for adults.

Changes

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top of this page. If the change is significant, we will say what changed.

Contact

pahanaproject@gmail.com