Privacy Policy

Introduction

The Stichting Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Academy (“MHPSS Academy”) aims to improve mental health globally, by strengthening capacity in scalable mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) interventions and approaches. Our vision is to promote and advance MHPSS worldwide. To achieve this, we have strong partnerships with individuals, organizations, agencies, and academic institutions working with MHPSS. We also offer capacity strengthening services to individuals, organizations, and companies.

By working closely with you in this way, we are required to have some information about you. We take good care of your personal data and take our responsibility to protect your privacy very seriously. Below you will information on how we use your personal data. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

Our privacy statement was last amended on 20 February 2026

Who is the privacy statement for?

It is for all individuals, organisations, academic institutions and others involved in our work. This includes individual donors, large and small institutional donors, partner organisations we work together with and people who participate in our capacity strengthening events.

Our privacy statement does not address the processing of employee, intern, consultant or volunteer data, which is covered by other internal privacy documents and agreements.

Who is responsible for your personal data?

We, the Stichting Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Academy, are responsible for securing your personal data.

When are we allowed to use your personal data?

Legislation allows us to use your personal data:

If you give us your permission. If you no longer want us to use your information, you are entitled to revoke your permission.
Legitimate interest. This means that we would use your personal data to do our work (in a better way).
A legal obligation. We abide to laws GDPR in the Netherlands. We do what legal authorities and/or the government in the Netherlands require us to do.

What personal data do we keep?

This varies according to the situation. The type of data we might keep includes:

First and last name
Residential address
Zip code
Phone number
Correspondence address
Billing address
Email address
Gender
Date of birth
Nationality
Payment and credit card information
Identity card
Chamber of Commerce data
VAT data
Tax information
Payment and order history
Donation amount
Medical data or dietary requirements (if you join one of our in-person trainings)
Your completed contact form (from our website)
Correspondence between you and the MHPSS Academy
Your answers to our surveys
Your photo, video footage, story and/or voice (if you agree to its use for public communication purposes)
Training data (for example, if you participate in one of our trainings as a trainer or participant)
Technical information and details about your visit to our website, such as your IP address, click and browsing behaviour
Login details to the Community platform (including your password)
Username

How do we gather information about you?

This can happen in various ways such as:

When we have direct contact with you, such as when you join our Bridge network and Roster, subscribe to our newsletter, join our trainings or other events, or contact us by email or phone.
When you visit our website or social media platforms.

How do we use your personal data?

We only use your personal data for specific purposes, such as:

To answer your online or offline questions or complaints.
To process and manage your donations.
To improve our newsletters, campaigns and services.
To inform you about our work by, for example, sending newsletters.
To get to know about your current areas of expertise and your interests in capacity strengthening by joining the Bridge network.
To get to know about your experience and interests in working with us in the Roster.
To ensure your safety as well as ours.
To comply with the law.
To protect your interests.
To ensure that the technical elements of our website are optimised for you.
To be able to manage your account on our website, so that your confidentiality is assured.
To ensure that you can get in touch with us, for example, via social media.
To develop market surveys and marketing strategies.
To see if we can accept you as a partner or supplier.
To enable the completion of an agreement with you as a company or supplier.
To enable the creation of internal reports and analyses (anonymously and at group level only).
To ensure our IT systems comply with our own rules and policies.
To enable you to participate in our campaigns and events.
To use your interview, photo or video footage (as agreed) for our public communications.
To monitor participants in our trainings and other events and to keep track of their participation and progress.
To develop and improve our projects and assistive technology.

How long do we keep your personal data?

We do not store your personal data for longer than is necessary. We keep it for as long as there is a commitment, agreement or cooperation between us. When this ends, we may keep your data for a varying length of time, from seven days to a maximum of ten years, after which time we will delete or anonymize it.

Here are some examples of how this works in practice:

If you contact us via the contact form on our website, we remove the contact form data after one month. If we need your data for longer (for example, to handle a question or complaint), we will keep your data for as long as needed, plus one month.
If you are on our Roster, we will keep your data as long as you wish to remain on the Roster.
To comply with legal obligations, we may keep your data in our system for another seven years.
If you contact us via social media, we will keep your data for a maximum of five years.
If you are an organization or institution we have entered into partnership agreement with or we have a Memorandum of Understanding, and the agreement expires, we will keep your data for five years from the agreement end.
If you are involved in interviews, webinars, photos or film footage for our public communications, we may keep and use your data for five years. After this time, the information will be moved to our archive and will only be used for historical purposes.
If you participate in our trainings, we will keep your data for up to five years after the end of the training.

Cookies

The MHPSS Aademy also collects information through the use of cookies. For more information, please refer to our Cookie Policy.

Who has access to your personal data?

The MHPSS Academy, being an international organisation might need to share your data with partner organizations or institutions in other countries. We do this mainly for administrative reasons. Our employees, interns, trainees and volunteers might be allowed to access your data, but only if they really need it to do their job.

We will never sell your data to third parties.

We might, however, share your data with third parties if it is absolutely necessary to do our work. If we share your data for research and development purposes, we will do so at a ‘merged level’, meaning the data is anonymous and can never be traced back to an individual.

If we use a third party, such as a marketing agency, it might be granted access to your personal data on our behalf as part of a ‘processor agreement’. This data would, however, only be used for the agreed purpose, and the third party would be required to treat your data as securely as we do, and then to remove it as soon as possible afterward.

The following parties could have access to your personal data to do their work for us, but only when absolutely necessary:

Banks
Insurance companies
IT vendors
Accountants
Auditors
Forensic specialists
Implementing partners or research partners
Marketing agencies, media agencies and data-enriching companies
Consultants

The government or other parties may also legally require us to show your data. We would only share necessary data.

How do we protect your personal data?

Safety is paramount to us at the MHPSS Academy. This also applies to your personal data. That’s why we only store your data on secure databases and constantly work on measures to ensure it remains safe. These measures may be technical or physical, or in making our colleagues aware of the importance of data security.

We do everything we can to avoid a data breach. In the exceptional event that this occurs, we commit to reporting it as soon as possible to the Dutch Data Protection Authority.

Questions and requests

We are delighted to answer any questions. You may also wish to contact us if you:

object to us processing your data
want to revoke previous consent
want access to your data
want to correct or supplement your data
want us to delete your data
want to have your data transferred to another party

Please contact us at:

The MHPSS Academy
info@mhpssacademy.org

Important: We may require proof of identity if your question relates to accessing, deleting, transferring, correcting, revoking or checking your data, or finding out how we process it.

If you are not satisfied with how we are handling your data or have another complaint relating to your personal data, you can file a complaint with the Dutch Data Protection Authority