Three Requests in One Week: Competence, Confidentiality, and Small-Cell Data
You coordinate a small nonprofit prevention agency. Three requests land in the same week. A school superintendent who sits on your board asks you to speak at a press conference supporting his district's new cellphone ban, framing it as a substance use prevention strategy; you have no local data on that link. A parent volunteer who has run your youth group for three years discloses that she is in recovery and asks that it stay private; last week a board member asked you, in a meeting, why the volunteer 'seems nervous.' Your largest funder requests the raw student survey data from a town of 900, broken out by grade; some grades have four students. Your certification renewal is due in 45 days and you have 12 of 20 required hours.
1. The press conference request. What do you do?
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The governing principle is to speak only within your data and your competence, and to avoid lending prevention's credibility to a claim it cannot support.
There is no local evidence that a cellphone ban reduces substance use. If you stand at that podium and say it will, you have made an unsupported causal claim, and the first journalist or opposing board member who checks will find it. That costs you the ability to make evidence-based claims later, when it matters.
What to do: decline the specific framing, not the relationship. Offer alternatives - speak to what the district's own data show about youth wellbeing, or appear jointly to support the ban as a general youth health measure while explicitly stating that it has not been evaluated as a substance use prevention strategy.
Say the reasoning out loud to the superintendent, privately and before the event: 'I can't say this prevents substance use because we don't have data showing that, and if I say it and it's challenged, both of us lose the argument.' Then give him a usable alternative so the refusal is not read as disloyalty. If pressure continues after that conversation, document it in writing - a board member's request and your response, kept factual.
On renewal hours: 12 of 20 with 45 days left is a real risk to your credential. Book the remaining hours this week, prioritizing ethics and evaluation content, rather than letting it compete with the press conference.
2. The volunteer's disclosure and the board member's question. How do you respond?
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Recovery status is the volunteer's personal health information. You do not confirm it, deny it, hint at it, or 'just explain' it - even to a board member, and even with the best intentions.
To the board member, redirect to behavior and process: 'I can't discuss any volunteer's personal situation. If you have a concern about how the youth group is running, tell me what you've observed and I'll follow up.' That response is not evasive; it is the correct boundary, and it is worth stating calmly so the boundary is established for next time.
The board member's remark is also a stigma signal, and that deserves attention at the board level in general terms - a short training on recovery, privacy, and the agency's obligations - without ever referencing this volunteer.
Separately, check the actual facts. Is there any conduct concern, or only an impression of nervousness? If there is a genuine performance issue, address it with the volunteer directly and privately, in behavioral terms, without assuming it relates to recovery. If there is no conduct concern, there is nothing to follow up.
Finally, check your agency's volunteer policies: what is documented, who has access, and what the volunteer was told at intake. If the policy is silent on confidentiality, that is a gap to fix before the next volunteer signs on.
3. The funder's data request. How do you respond?
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Release the data, but not at that level of granularity. In a town of 900, grade-level breakouts with four students per cell are effectively identifiable - a student's answers, combined with grade, school, and what the town already knows about who uses, can point to a specific teenager. That is a confidentiality breach with real consequences in a small community.
What to do:
- Supply aggregate data for the town, and grade bands (6-8, 9-12) where cells are large enough.
- Apply a suppression rule - commonly no reporting of cells below 10 (some agencies use 5) - and flag suppressed cells rather than filling them in.
- Offer alternatives: comparisons against county or state rates, trend summaries, or a licensed analyst running the funder's questions and returning only aggregate output.
- Check the paperwork: the consent and assurance language in the original survey, and any data-sharing agreement. The funder may be entitled to data, but almost never to identifiable data, and that distinction is the one to hold.
Explain the suppression rule to the funder proactively, in writing, with the reason. Funders rarely object when the reason is stated; they object when they discover a limitation after the fact. Document the request, your response, and the reasoning - that record protects both the participants and you.