Statement on HIPAA and FERPA

We are committed to upholding the principles and procedures of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

Much of our educational and health services involve longterm, multi-year whole-community transformation emphasizing deep, immersive, almost-daily community participatory research, community participatory mindfulness, intake communications, case management, and community counseling with youth, parents/guardians, and families. Our goal is to offer educational and health services that uplift peace, justice, equity, and wellness in measurable ways. Our work is trauma-informed, disability-aware, and culturally-sensitive/responsive. 

At the core of this immersive involvement is our commitment to protecting enrolled community members' contact information, educational records, and health records in accordance with HIPAA and FERPA laws. We continually discover in our immersive, daily work with under-resourced community members, that they exhibit high levels of institutional distrust with good reason because many of the institutions that engage with them do so with great intentions, yet in paternalistic ways that break confidentiality and/or challenge the development of trustworthiness and cultural sensitivity in the engagement.

Often this distrust comes from instances when community members are often asked to be involved in research or interviewed for projects that carry no actual extensive, deep, holistic or material benefit for them. In contrast, all of our educational and health services are 100 percent beneficial to community members' well-being on multiple levels for the longterm.

Disclosing community members' contact information breaches our HIPAA and FERPA commitments. Asking them if it's okay if we give their contact information to others for research purposes (or other designs) also presents significant problems. Moreover, when representatives from other institutions go around us to contact the enrolled community members that we serve, these actions also breed distrust and confusion.

Even if it appears to be okay on the surface, we have found that breaching confidentiality, or appearing to do so, has the potential to undermine the trust and care that we have spent years developing inside of communities. This trust and care is essential to our ability to recommend transformations in their lives as we offer educational and health services.