Community Preparedness Team Privacy Policy
Volunteers are required to provide some personal information to the Portland Bureau of Emergency Management's (PBEM's) Community Preparedness Team (CPT) for the purpose of routine program administration. That information is primarily provided through the volunteer application form and MyImpactPage (MIP) portal.
• This data is recorded in the Volunteer Impact management system, which is hosted securely on a third-party vendor’s system, not on City computers. The company is Better Impact, and their privacy policy is here. (In the programs we call the portal ‘MIP’, which is a reference to the URL where volunteers log in: MyImpactPage.com.)
• City policy – and in fact it might actually be law, I’m not sure – forbids employees from disclosing your address to anyone. Full stop.
• I am not sure if you got to this point in the form, but there is a required checkbox that reads, ‘I grant the City of Portland permission to share my name, email address, and telephone numbers with my volunteer Team Leader(s) for the purpose of contacting me for Team management.’ That is all the information we disclose. We occasionally receive requests from Team Leaders for their Team Members’ addresses so that they can make a map for planning purposes, and we refuse those requests. Team Members may, of course, choose to disclose that information to each other, but PBEM/the City cannot.
• If the data in Volunteer Impact/MIP was ever caught up in a FOIA request, I am confident that the City Attorney would argue that personal contact information – especially individual’s addresses – are not subject to disclosure and should be redacted. FWIW, my home address is in there too. :-)
The next (and probably final) point in your PBEM Volunteer journey where I expect you will have questions related to private information is when your background check is requested. If you would like to look ahead at that, information about it is here:
