@PennyToffee · Today 22:45
You know I read the FWR board and i do get some of it, but then they wang on about boycotting Lush or whichever company has pissed them off this week and the love for JK Rowling who is a fucking millionaire and can afford to Tweet and say what she likes and I think you have no clue about WC women and what they need. What they need the government to do for them.
I think you may not have realised this (quoted below) about JK Rowling. It is from a longer article about her philanthropy but I couldn’t quote it all.
Also, recently, she has set up, and is paying for with her own money, a rape crisis centre in Edinburgh so women who have been raped can get help in a male free space ( there are other provisions in Edinburgh for men of any identity who have been raped). Obviously the service will be for any WC who need it.
In 2000, Rowling established the Volant Charitable Trust, which uses its annual budget to combat poverty and social inequality, with a particular emphasis on women and children. Volant also funds major disaster appeals as the focus of the Trust's international support.
*“It’s much easier for certain sections of society to say. "You’ve brought this on yourself by your fecklessness; you sort it out," than to say "You’ve been a victim of circumstances" or "Hey, marriages break up…..but how are we going to help you help yourself?"^
^Her philanthropy is now unabashedly visible and involved. For example,
two books written for Comic Relief – Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Quidditch Through the Ages – have gone on to raise £15.7m for the fund. Rowling has said that “You have a moral responsibility when you’ve been given far more than you need, to do wise things with it and give intelligently”. Rather than passively signing large cheques, she involves herself not only in the organisation of her own charities but also in well-publicised events (such as a reading with Stephen King and John Irving in New York to raise money for AIDS and ‘Medicine Without Borders’), that increase the public and media profile of the cause she is supporting as well as raising substantial amounts of money.^
^In the last couple of years, Rowling has been almost hyper-active in her giving of her time, money and her celebrity status.
In 2006, she contributed a substantial sum towards the creation of a new Centre for Regenerative Medicine at Edinburgh University – her mother died of multiple sclerosis - and hosted a fund-raising ball with her anaesthetist husband to mark the twelfth anniversary of her mother’s death^
In the same year, Rowling went to Bucharest to highlight the use of child institutions in the region and raise support for the Children’s High-Level Group (CHLG), which was founded by her and MEP Emma Nicholson. In 2010, CHLG became Lumos Foundation which now works globally to end the institutionalisation of children, a little-known issue that affects 8 million children around the world, most who have parents but are placed in orphanages and institutions through poverty, disability, conflict and crisis. To support Lumos, Rowling auctioned one of seven handwritten and illustrated copies of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a collection of wizarding fairy tales alluded to in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book of the Harry Potter series, and raised £1.95m for the charity.
In addition, in 2015, her Harvard commencement speech from 2008 Very Good Lives was released in book form with proceeds of the sales going to support Lumos' work
After the bid, she said, “Large amounts of wealth bring a certain responsibility if you’re any kind of human being, then after you fulfil your family’s needs, you think, well how do I do some good with this?”
About Lush - did you realise Lush had been sending out breast-binders to young girls under cover so their parents wouldn’t know; and that they can cause a lot of harm to girls’ breast tissue, hurt their ribs and be bad for breathing? The fuss over Lush wasn’t for a minor reason. A lot of people end up on the FWR board because of their own family being affected.