Safeguarding,Privacy & Policies.

All activity involving young people is supervised by the Genuine Futures team. Safeguarding procedures govern every programme, enterprise brief and business interaction.

Young people work through authorised directory access only. Internal project management systems are operated by the management team and are never youth-facing.

We do not publish a young person's private contact details, and we use names, images, quotes or stories only where the required consent and publication approval are in place.

If you have a safeguarding concern, contact us immediately via the Contact page and mark your message 'Safeguarding'.

No photograph, film, quote or story involving a young person or a business is published without explicit consent and final approval.

Businesses approve their own spotlights, images and stories before publication. Young people — and where required, parents or guardians — approve theirs.

Real people's appearances are preserved; images are never altered to misrepresent.

If you withdraw consent for content featuring you or your business, contact us and we will review removal promptly.

You may create or claim a listing only for a business you are authorised to represent. Information must be accurate, current and suitable for public display.

Listings are reviewed before publication. We may request changes, decline content, or remove a listing where information is misleading, unsafe, unlawful, discriminatory or outside the directory's purpose.

Free means free: a basic listing does not require a card. Optional paid services are clearly identified before purchase.

A Verified badge is never automatic and never given because a business pays. It only follows a documented check: a named reviewer records the evidence examined, the date, and an expiry date.

Evidence can include official records, insurance, qualifications, professional registration, trading address confirmation or direct owner confirmation, depending on the business.

Every verification is logged in an audit history. When evidence expires or can no longer be supported, the badge is removed.

Registered means an account exists. Reviewed means our team approved the listing for publication. Verified means documented evidence was checked. We never blur those three.

Reviews must come from a genuine first-hand experience, be written respectfully, and avoid private personal data, allegations we cannot assess, hate, harassment or spam.

Every review is checked by a person before publication. We may reject or remove reviews that are fake, incentivised without disclosure, abusive, unsafe or unrelated to the business.

Businesses may respond through the team where a review raises a concern. We do not publish fabricated testimonials or unlabelled sample endorsements.

Some directory profiles may be created from publicly available business information so owners can find and claim them. Claiming a profile requires evidence that you are authorised to act for the business.

We may ask for a business email address, public record, website confirmation or another reasonable check before assigning ownership.

A business can ask us to correct or remove an unclaimed profile via the Contact page.

We collect the information needed to operate the directory: account details, business profile content, enquiries, reviews, claims, moderation records and payment status.

We use it to provide accounts, publish approved listings, respond to enquiries, review content, prevent abuse, manage memberships and operate safeguarding/audit processes.

We do not sell personal information or share it with third parties for their own marketing. Service providers process data only where needed to run the platform, email and payment services.

Information is kept only while needed for the directory, legal, safeguarding, financial or audit purposes. You can ask us to access, correct or delete your information via the Contact page, subject to records we must keep.

The site uses essential browser storage to keep your sign-in session working and remember secure application state.

We do not use advertising cookies. If privacy-respecting measurement is added, it will be explained here before or when it is enabled.

You can clear browser storage at any time, which will sign you out of the website.

Paid memberships and one-off showcase orders are processed through GoCardless. Card or bank details are handled by the payment provider, not stored as card details on this website.

The price and billing type are shown before checkout. Active recurring memberships can be cancelled from the member dashboard.

Refund, service-delivery and Direct Debit questions should be raised through the Contact page so the team can review the individual order or membership.

We aim for WCAG 2.1 AA: strong colour contrast, resizable text, keyboard-navigable pages and descriptive alt text.

If anything on this site is hard to use, tell us via the Contact page and we will fix it.