Privacy Policy

1. Overview

Aura Growth Partners, LLC ("we," "us," or "our") is committed to protecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, and safeguard your information across our websites, portals, and applications — including Homeward Circle (our foster-parent training and support platform, at homewardcircle.com and in the Homeward Circle mobile app) and our advisory services, including data retrieved via third-party integrations like QuickBooks Online.

If anything here is unclear, contact us at the address in Section 9 and we will give you a straight answer.

2. Homeward Circle

Homeward Circle is provided to Licensed Child Placing Agencies and similar organizations ("agencies"). If you use Homeward Circle as a foster or kinship parent, mentor, or agency staff member, your account exists at your agency's direction — families and staff join by invitation, and an agency's authorized representative may create the agency's account directly.

2.1 What we collect

• Account information: your name and email address, and — depending on how you sign in — a password (stored only as a salted hash) or a stable account identifier from Google or Apple. With Google or Apple sign-in we receive your name, email address, and that identifier; we never see or store your Google or Apple password.
• Training and licensing progress: attendance at training events, compliance-checklist status, license and milestone records, and badge awards — entered by you or by your agency's staff as part of your agency's licensing process.
• Your reflections: short personal statements you choose to write in the app (such as your "why").
• Circle messages: messages you post in training and support circles. Message content is encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM) and is never included in emails or push notifications. Within your agency's rules, messages may include information about the children in your care, including their health. Where your agency has signed a Business Associate Agreement with us, that information is handled as protected health information under that agreement; agencies without one direct their families not to share children's medical or case details in circles.
• Notification data: a device push token, if you enable notifications.
• Technical data: standard server logs (IP address and request metadata), kept briefly for security and troubleshooting.

The Homeward Circle mobile app contains no advertising, no third-party analytics, and no third-party crash-reporting SDKs. If the app encounters an error, it reports the technical details (which screen, the app version, and the error text) directly to us and to no one else. It does not track you across other apps or websites.

2.2 How we use it

We use this information only to run the service: tracking training progress for your agency's licensing requirements, enabling communication within your agency's circles, sending you service notifications, and keeping the platform secure. We do not use your data for advertising, and we do not sell it (Section 6).

2.3 Who can see your information

Being clear about this matters more here than in most apps:

• Your agency. Agency staff (coordinators and administrators) can see your training progress, requirements and milestones, and licensing dates, and they participate in your agency's circles as disclosed members — they can read and post there, and this is stated in the confidentiality guidelines you accept in the app.
• Other members of your circles see what you post there. Circles are limited to families in your agency whom staff have placed there, each of whom has accepted the same confidentiality commitment you have.
• Us. Our operational access is limited and logged. Our administrative tools do not display circle message content, and operational access to it is limited, logged, and audited.
• No one else. Agencies are isolated from one another at the database level; no other agency can see your information.

2.4 What we never collect

By design, Homeward Circle does not collect or store Social Security numbers, medical records, background-check documents, homestudy files, or any document uploads. Licensing evidence of that kind is stored in your agency's own system of record.

2.5 Children

Homeward Circle is used by adults — foster and kinship parents, mentors, and agency staff. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect information directly from anyone under 18. Information that indirectly references children in care may appear in content written by adult users; it is protected by the encryption, access, and confidentiality safeguards described in this policy and by your agency's own confidentiality rules.

2.6 Security

All connections use HTTPS/TLS. Circle message content is encrypted at rest. Each agency's data is isolated by database-level row security, not just application code. Sign-in uses short-lived tokens stored in your device's secure storage. Administrative actions are audit-logged. Push notifications and emails never contain message content — they tell you something happened and ask you to open the app.

2.7 Retention and deletion

• Circle messages are permanently deleted on a rolling schedule set by your agency (90 days by default).
• Your account: you can delete it yourself at any time in the app (Settings → "Delete my account") or by emailing us. Deletion takes effect immediately: your name, email, and sign-in credentials are permanently removed, your sessions are revoked, and your personal reflections are deleted. Attendance, compliance, and license records created for your agency's own licensing process are retained by the agency but are no longer connected to any retrievable identity.
• Acceptance records: records of your acceptance of in-app agreements (which agreement, which version, and when) are retained as compliance records for your agency and its auditors.
• Backups age out automatically within 14 days, after which deleted data is gone from backups too.

2.8 Service providers

We use a small number of service providers, each receiving only what its job requires: our hosting provider (infrastructure the platform runs on), Postmark (delivers transactional email such as invites and password resets — logistics only, never message content), Expo/Apple/Google push services (deliver notifications — generic payloads only, never content), and Stripe (billing for agencies — parents never pay and no parent payment data exists). We do not permit these providers to use your data for their own purposes.

3. Advisory Services and QuickBooks Online

For clients of our advisory services:

QuickBooks Online Data: When you authorize our Services to connect to your QuickBooks Online account, we retrieve specific financial and company data (e.g., Chart of Accounts, Profit & Loss statements, Balance Sheets) via the Intuit API. This access is governed by the OAuth 2.0 consent process.

We use this information strictly to provide advisory services and financial dashboards, perform data analysis to identify growth plateaus and operational improvements, and maintain and improve the functionality of our applications.

Intuit Credentials: We never request or store your Intuit ID or password. Access is managed solely through encrypted OAuth tokens. We retain your financial data only as long as necessary to provide the Services or as required by law.

Our Services interact with third-party platforms like Intuit. While we take every precaution to secure your data within our environment, we are not responsible for the privacy practices of these third-party providers. We encourage you to review Intuit's Privacy Statement.

You may revoke our access to your QuickBooks Online data at any time through your Intuit account settings or by contacting us directly.

4. Website Analytics

Our marketing websites may use self-hosted, cookie-free analytics that collect aggregate page-view statistics only — running on our own infrastructure, with no third-party analytics services, no cookies, no cross-site tracking, and no personal profiles. The Homeward Circle application itself contains no analytics (Section 2.1).

5. Agencies with Legal Confidentiality Obligations

Foster-care information is confidential under state law, and some agencies are additionally subject to HIPAA or other regulatory code. Where an agency's legal obligations require it, we enter into the appropriate agreements (such as Business Associate Agreements) with that agency, and the safeguards in Section 2.6 are designed to support those obligations.

6. Data Sharing

We do not sell or trade your personal or financial data, and we do not share it with third parties for advertising. We may share anonymized, aggregated data with third parties for benchmarking purposes, provided no individual company or person can be identified. We may disclose information if required by law, in which case we will notify the affected agency unless legally prohibited from doing so.

7. Your Rights

You have the right to access, correct, or delete your personal information. For Homeward Circle accounts, deletion is self-service (Section 2.7); for anything else, contact us and we will respond promptly. Depending on where you live, state law may give you additional rights regarding your personal information; we honor access, correction, and deletion requests from all users regardless of state.

8. Updates

We may update this policy to reflect changes in our technology or legal requirements. The latest version will always be available on this page, with the "Last updated" date above.

9. Contact

Aura Growth Partners, LLC
Email: privacy@auragrowth.partners