Raise is committed to providing a high quality service to all of its stakeholders, including students, donors, and partners. We recognize that sometimes things may go wrong, and we want to make sure that we handle complaints in a fair, timely, and effective manner.
A complaint is any expression of dissatisfaction with Raise's services, activities, or volunteers. This policy explains how you can make a complaint, and how you can expect us to handle it. Anyone can make a complaint, including if you are a member of the public, a donor, or a volunteer.
Making a complaint
Our complaints procedure encourages local resolution to help resolve your complaint quickly and effectively. However, you can escalate your complaint to the next stage if you feel uncomfortable raising your concern with the proposed contact, or feel that it is so serious that informal resolution would be inappropriate.
Stage 1: Contact the president of the Raise chapter that relates to your complaint, who will then try to resolve the matter informally. If you're unsure of their contact details, contact raisenational@gmail.com.
Stage 2: Make a formal complaint by emailing the national team at raisenational@gmail.com. In this email, please include:
Stage 3: If you're not satisfied with the national team's response, you can escalate your complaint to the charity trustees by contacting the chair of the trustees, Adam Jones.
Stage 4: If your complaint is still not resolved, you can escalate your complaint to our regulators:
How we handle complaints
When you make a formal complaint to the national team or the trustees, we will:
When investigating your complaint, we will process your personal data securely and in line with our privacy policy. This may include sharing your data internally and with third parties such as our regulators. If you'd prefer that we didn't share your personal data with particular people or bodies, please let us know and we'll do our best to comply with this (although we may not be able to keep confidentiality if we have a legal obligation to report something, such as someone being at imminent risk of serious harm).
Whistleblower protection
Raise is committed to a culture of openness and transparency. We encourage volunteers to speak out about wrongdoing, even if it is not directly related to their own work. A whistleblower is anyone who in good faith tries to raise a concern following this policy about suspected illegal, unethical or unsafe behaviour.
If you have concerns about wrongdoing at Raise, you can submit and escalate them via the complaints process. You can also receive confidential advice from Protect, an independent whistleblowing advice charity.
Raise will not tolerate intimidation or victimisation of whistleblowers. Anyone found responsible for such action will be subject to severe disciplinary action.