How to Work With Stardust

How to work with Stardust

We get a lot of approaches, and we say yes to a smaller number of them than

people expect. This page explains what we are actually looking for, so that you

do not spend a month on a proposal we were never going to take.

What we say yes to

• Work that puts a young person somewhere they could not otherwise go.
• Partners who bring capability we do not have, rather than a logo swap.
• Research that runs under a proper ethics framework.
• Funders and sponsors who accept that we will not trade access to our members

for money.

• Anything that survives being described plainly to a fourteen-year-old.

What we say no to

• Access to our members' contact details. We will never sell, rent or share

them. If you have an opportunity, we will tell our members and they will come

to you if they want to.

• Licensing our members' content, course material or event recordings for

training artificial intelligence systems. This is a firm no, and it is

absolute where a person under 18 appears.

• Anything that makes a young person's participation the price of a deal.
• Exclusive arrangements that would close doors for our members.
• Endorsements of a product we have not used, or a claim we cannot evidence.
• Being named as a partner on the strength of a single meeting.

What we need from you before we can move

1. Who you are, and which legal entity would sign.

2. What you actually want, in one sentence.

3. What you are bringing, and what you need from us.

4. Whether young people are involved, and if so, how they are protected.

5. Any deadline that is real, and why.

How it usually goes

A conversation first, no documents. If there is something there, we write a

short memorandum of understanding that is deliberately non-binding, so both

sides can find out whether we work well together before anyone is committed.

Money, if there is any, is a separate written agreement after that.

We are slower than you might like at the start and faster than you expect once

we are in. That order is deliberate.

If young people will be involved

Expect us to ask about consent, guardians, safeguarding, screening for anyone

working unsupervised with under-18s, and what happens to any recording

afterwards. If that feels like a lot, we are probably not the right partner for

you, and it is better that we both find that out early.

Who to write to

Partnerships and programmes: contact@stardustinc.ca

Research and ethics: jason.m@stardustinc.ca

Anything involving the safety of a young person: jason.m@stardustinc.ca and

ashley.hg@stardustinc.ca

Please do not send confidential material in a first email. We will tell you when

there is somewhere secure to put it.