Terms of Use

You must be at least 13 to create an account. If you are under 18, a parent or guardian must consent and, for students, sign the consent form we provide. Schools, teachers, and judges must be authorised to act in the capacity they claim.

• Provide accurate information and keep it current. You are responsible for activity under your account and for keeping your password confidential.
• Donors must complete verification before donating to a named student. Unverified donors may still give to the general fund.
• Students, schools, and teachers must pass verification before appearing publicly, receiving funds, or nominating.
• We may refuse, suspend, or revoke verification and close accounts for false information, misuse, or risk to students.

Donations are made to Hariom Helps Foundation, not directly to a student, school, or campaign. We honour your designation wherever practicable, but as a 501(c)(3) we must retain final discretion and control over the use of all funds. Full detail — fees, refunds, partial funding, withdrawals, and reallocation — is in our Donation, Refund & Disbursement Policy.

• Students must describe their need honestly, supply genuine documents, and nominate a real, verified payout school. Funds are paid to the school, never to a student in cash.
• A student may reduce or withdraw a funding request at any time. If donations have already been received, our refund and reallocation process applies and the student must cooperate with the school to return unused amounts.
• Schools must supply accurate payout instructions and confirm receipt of funds. Schools may also apply for support, subject to verification.
• Teachers may nominate students only where they have a genuine professional relationship with the student and, where required, the family's knowledge.

Entry, judging, community voting, and prizes are governed by the Official Rules, which form part of these terms for anyone who enters, judges, or votes. No purchase or donation is required to enter or win.

You keep ownership of the text, images, video links, and documents you submit. You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, and — for material you have agreed to make public, such as a student story or a finalist submission — display and share it in foundation communications. You confirm you have the rights to everything you upload.

• No false, misleading, plagiarised, or fabricated submissions or documents.
• No impersonating a student, parent, school, teacher, judge, or the foundation.
• No vote manipulation: bots, scripted voting, purchased votes, or coordinated inauthentic activity. Entries connected to manipulation are disqualified.
• No scraping, bulk download, security probing, rate-limit circumvention, or attempts to access records that are not yours.
• No harassment of students, families, staff, or judges, and no contacting students outside the site's channels.

Payments run through Stripe under Stripe's own terms. The site links to external resources, including sankhanagchoudhury.com and fundmydreams.org, and to book retailers. We are not responsible for third-party sites or their content.

Nothing on this site is tax, legal, financial, or educational advice. Consult your own adviser about the deductibility of a gift in your situation.

The site is provided "as is" and "as available" without warranties of any kind to the fullest extent permitted by law. We do not guarantee that any funding goal will be met, that any application will be approved, or that the site will be uninterrupted or error-free.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Hariom Helps Foundation is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages. Our total liability for any claim relating to the site is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim. Some jurisdictions do not allow these limits, so they may not apply to you, and nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

We may suspend or terminate access, remove content, cancel an entry, or reverse a verification if these terms are breached or if a student's safety, donor funds, or the integrity of the challenge is at risk. You may close your account at any time by contacting us.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of [State of incorporation — to be added], United States, without regard to conflict-of-law rules, and the courts located there have exclusive jurisdiction. If you use the site from outside the US, you do so on your own initiative and are responsible for local law; mandatory consumer protections in your country of residence still apply to you.

Before filing anything, please email hello@hariomhelps.com — we resolve nearly everything informally.

We may update these terms; the "last updated" date changes and continued use means acceptance. Material changes affecting account holders are announced by email.