Safeguarding

This app puts adults in the same place as young people. That is the entire point of it, and it is also the thing that has to be handled carefully. This page sets out what the software does to keep that safe, and what it deliberately refuses to do.

What the app will not do

• Students have no accounts. There is no student login, no student profile, and no way for a student to be contacted through this app.
• There is no messaging. No chat, no comments, no direct messages — between leaders and students or between anyone else. A leader cannot use this app to start a private conversation with a young person.
• There are no photographs. No student images are stored or displayed anywhere.
• Nothing is public. No roster, schedule or student name is reachable without signing in as an approved leader. There is no public profile page and nothing is indexed by search engines.

Who gets access

Access is by invitation only. A youth pastor adds a leader’s email address; only then can that address receive a sign-in link. Nobody can request access for themselves, and there is no sign-up form.

The app cannot tell you whether someone has been background-checked. That check is the ministry’s responsibility and it must happen before an address is invited. Inviting someone is the moment that decision is made — treat it with the seriousness that implies.

Access is removed by revoking the invite or removing the account. A removed leader’s sessions end immediately.

Visibility as a safeguard

Every commitment is recorded against the leader who made it, and is visible to the other leaders in that ministry. Who is going to which game, and who went, is shared information rather than private arrangement.

This is deliberate. A leader planning to attend a young person’s game is doing something good and ordinary, and it should be visible to their colleagues. Attendance that nobody else knows about is the pattern safeguarding policies exist to prevent.

Released commitments are kept rather than deleted, so the record of what was promised stays accurate.

What we ask of ministries using it

• Background-check and train every leader before inviting their email address.
• Follow your own two-adult rule. This app shows public school fixtures; it is not a chaperoning plan.
• Tell parents you are using it, and honour any request to remove a student without argument.
• Review who has access at the start of each season and remove anyone who has moved on.
• Keep notes about students factual and kind. Assume the student and their parents will read them.

Raising a concern

If you have a concern about a child’s immediate safety, contact your local authorities first. This app is not a reporting channel and nobody is monitoring it for emergencies.

For concerns about how this app is being used — an account that should not have access, information that should not be there, a student who should be removed — write to hello@ourstands.com, and contact the ministry’s safeguarding lead in parallel.

A note on this page

This describes how the software behaves and the practices we ask of ministries using it. It is not a substitute for your own safeguarding policy, and it is not legal advice. Your denomination, insurer or local law may require more. Where they conflict with anything here, they win.