How we look after your information.

01

Who we are

ALIKRAM Burial Services is a volunteer-led charity in Birmingham, registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales under charity number 1180447. We serve the Eritrean Muslim community of Birmingham and the West Midlands through welfare, community work, and Islamic burial.

When you apply for membership, ALIKRAM Burial Services is the data controller for the information you give us. That means we are responsible for deciding how it is used and for keeping it safe.

We are a small charity and are not required to appoint a Data Protection Officer. Questions about your information are handled by the trustees, who can be reached using the details at the foot of this page.

02

What we collect

Almost everything we hold comes directly from you, on the membership application form. We do not buy data, and we do not collect it from anywhere else.

03

Why we collect it, and our legal basis

We ask for each of these things for a reason, and we do not ask for more than we need.

Your name, date of birth, address and contact details let us identify you, keep your membership record accurate, and reach you about your membership. Your marital status and family details determine which membership category you fall into and therefore what you pay. Your next of kin details let us reach someone close to you when it matters most — which, given the burial service we exist to provide, is the single most important entry on the form.

Our legal basis for holding this is that it is necessary to perform our membership agreement with you, and, for records we keep beyond that, our legitimate interests in running the charity properly, keeping accurate financial records, and fulfilling our obligations to members and their families.

Everything the application form asks for is information we need in order to make you a member. It is a condition of joining rather than something the law obliges you to give us, but the practical effect is the same: if you leave it out, we cannot process your application.

We do not use your information for marketing, and we do not sell or rent it to anyone.

04

Sensitive information

Some of what we hold counts as special category data under UK data protection law, which carries extra protection. Membership of ALIKRAM says something about your religious belief, and we ask whether you are of Eritrean origin, which says something about your ethnic origin.

We are allowed to hold this because the law makes specific provision for not-for-profit bodies with a religious aim to keep records about their own members. We do not disclose it outside the charity without your permission, unless the law requires us to.

05

Who can see it

Your record is visible to the trustees and to the small number of volunteers who administer memberships and payments. Nobody else in the charity has access to it, and no other member can see your details.

We share information outside ALIKRAM only where we have to: with the companies that provide the systems we run on, with our bank, and where the law or a court requires it. In the event of a death, we contact the next of kin recorded on your application in order to carry out the funeral service.

06

Where your information is held

Your membership record is stored on a server in the United Kingdom, and it stays there.

There is one exception. When you submit an application, an automatic notification is sent to our administrators so they know to review it. That email is delivered by SendGrid, a service based in the United States, and it contains your name, your email address and your membership reference. UK data protection law allows a transfer like this where the recipient is contractually required to protect the information to UK standards, which our email provider is.

Nothing else leaves the United Kingdom, and we use no other overseas provider.

07

How long we keep it

We keep your membership record for as long as you are a member, and for a period afterwards so that we can answer questions about past membership, keep our accounts in order, and meet our obligations to your family.

That period is ten years from the date your membership ends, whether it lapses or you choose to leave. The same ten years applies to the next of kin you have named and to the details of any children recorded on a family membership, counted from the end of the membership rather than from a child's sixteenth birthday.

Financial records — your payments, fees and the receipts behind them — are also kept for ten years. Charities are expected to keep financial records for at least six years, and we keep ours longer so that questions about past contributions can always be answered.

Once ten years have passed we delete the record.

08

Children's information

A family membership records the name, date of birth and gender of each child under sixteen, so that the charity knows who the membership covers. We hold nothing else about them, and we never contact them directly.

A parent or guardian provides this as part of their own application, and can ask us to correct or remove it at any time. Anyone aged sixteen or over must apply for their own membership rather than being added to a family record.

09

Your next of kin

Your application asks for the name, relationship, phone number and address of one person we can contact on your behalf. This is the only place where we hold details of somebody who has not applied to us themselves, and we treat it accordingly: we use it to contact that person about you, and for nothing else.

Please tell the person you name that you have given us their details, and that we may contact them. They have the same rights over their information as you have over yours, and can write to us at the address below to see what we hold, correct it, or ask us to remove it.

10

Your rights

UK data protection law gives you real control over the information we hold about you. You can ask us to do any of the following, and we will respond within one month.

• See it. Ask for a copy of everything we hold about you.
• Correct it. Tell us something is wrong or out of date, and we will put it right.
• Delete it. Ask us to erase your information, where we have no continuing reason to keep it.
• Restrict it. Ask us to hold your information but stop using it while a question is resolved.
• Object to it. Object to us using your information where we rely on our legitimate interests.
• Take it with you. Ask for your information in a portable form.
• Withdraw your consent. Where you gave us consent — such as the box you ticked when you applied — you can take it back. Doing so does not undo anything done lawfully beforehand, and we may still need to keep some information to run your membership.

None of this costs anything, and asking will never affect your membership.

11

Complaints

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please tell us first — we would far rather put it right ourselves. If you are still not satisfied, you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK's independent data protection regulator, at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.