Women's legal funding platform

[Slythermum]

On another thread I started @FlyingOink mentioned "The most useful thing we could do now is to come up with a funding platform for future cases that can't be brought down by twitter activists."

I think this deserves its own thread.

I am wondering if one of the law firms (or a few of them together) who represents women could create a platform - Maybe legalfeminist.org.uk/ would know how to do this.

Would it need a wholly onboard internet provider who couldn't be pressured into taking it down?

I think this is a great idea. I suspect there would be all sorts of challenges but as women are demonstrating, we won't be silenced and we won't give up.

Thanks for making this thread.

I think some of the issues with the existing funding platforms is that they cover lots of different causes, and want to avoid any controversy. That makes them very susceptible to influence from activists. (Crowdjustice, GoFundMe etc)
Having a separate website for example, still runs the risk that the payment companies will be bullied into not processing the payments. PayPal, the credit card companies, and other online payment portals have all been influenced to drop certain websites. Some have been porn sites, some have been far-right sites, there's various reasons for the service to have been withdrawn. I'm not equating us with say, Identity Europa, but the end result is the same, anything that could cause these platforms to get bad press results in a withdrawal of service.
There are other ways of getting money from A to B though. Money transfer companies haven't been influenced yet, as far as I know. (eg Western Union). There is the option to send cheques, for those people who still have a cheque book.
We've seen women's groups have their bank accounts shut down though, I seem to remember a few years ago the Cooperative Bank did that.
I don't have an answer, but a way to donate money, know where it is going, get reports on what is being done with it, and maybe even a way to suggest new cases to be brought - I think this would be incredibly useful.

Would it need a wholly onboard internet provider who couldn't be pressured into taking it down?
And couldn't be DDOSed into oblivion either. For example, how much money, time and effort does it take to keep KiwiFarms up, considering it is hacked on a daily basis? How much would we as contributors accept in terms of a percentage for overheads to keep the place going?

And then the other end - say we managed to get a (for example) US based company to run a server and a secure payment platform, is there then an issue with using hidden, overseas funds (which may have originated from our pockets in the UK) to pay for legal fees in the UK?

Sorry I have more questions than answers, but there must be a legal, reliable way for a group of women to collect money for potential legal action.
Do we have to set up as a union? Or a charity? Or a members' club?

Could we form a group (of thousands, say) and instruct a legal firm as a group? Is that feasible?

Would receiving payment piecemeal from lots of different people be totally unworkable for the legal firm?

Another alternative is having an intermediary website or group that validates individuals who are undertaking legal action, and collects receipts for where the money has gone, so that contributors could pay into the individual's personal bank account. But if the individual did a runner, the intermediary would have no way of recovering contributions, so that's a trust based endeavour (mind you so is much of what's on the funding platforms anyway).
And I'm sure there's a good reason not to advertise bank account details publicly.

This idea interests me a lot. Hampered by minimal knowledge of business or law, but I adore the idea of a Women's Social and Political Union for the 21st century.

Could we tie in with something massive and uncancellable (my dream: an arm of Lumos, with JKR as patron)?

The Baroness surely knows someone who owns a bank.

Allison Bailey managed it via her own site.

Some sort of group of GC lawyers on retainer? Banks might be less willing to try to part lawyers from their money...

Any suggestions are good, hopefully someone reading can point us in the right direction

Just going to comment in passing that isn't it remarkable how fast the slide into authoritarianism has been?

20 years ago it would have been inconceivable that people would be having payment options blocked, or service denied for anything that wasn't actually illegal.

Now, it's practically routine, and normal people are having to desperately seek some way to just conduct business.

I think this is a good idea.

It would be useful if we could establish a fund where women could apply to get their legal expenses covered in cases that involve women's sex based rights. Instead of each separate cause having to fund raise women could apply to the fund instead.

I keep reading about how the mega rich manage to avoid taxes by setting up funds, could women avoid misogynistic persecution by setting up a fund to finance our causes?

Stealhsquirrelnutkin exactly but I think we'd need to make sure the fund was easy to donate to, that the bank holding it didn't shut the account, that online payments were possible, and that there was some form of feedback for contributors about which cases were selected to go ahead and the status of each.

20 years ago it would have been inconceivable that people would be having payment options blocked, or service denied for anything that wasn't actually illegal.

It's wild isn't it? It should be so straightforward. There are so many payment portals and funding apps available, these days you can buy something online (and pay in instalments) and pick it up from a lock box, and buy a cash top-up Visa/Mastercard and have a burner mobile with no links to you and and and...

but try to set up a legitimate women's rights fund and you might as well be plotting something heinous.

It should be possible to write a simple website which could be hosted on one of the cloud providers like AWS and connect through to one of the card payment processors (like Stripe). Simple enough that instructions could be written to allow anyone who was seeking legal help to set up their own.

Problems would be

• how to ensure that the instructions weren't maliciously modified

• think some card payment processors have got cold feet in the past
• AWS can easily handle DDOS attack but it would cost the person running the website (it would also cost to attack it though)

JustWaking do you think Stripe would continue offering their services if they were targetted on twitter?
That's my concern with existing payment services. They get cold feet.
It's possible to switch from one to another as required I guess but each time there's going to be a setup cost, possibly some lost money in terms of advance payments awaiting return, and the disruption for contributors which not only costs in terms of lost contributions but might put potential contributors off.

I get it though, in theory it should be possible to run a platform similar to JustGiving, say, and find a payment processor that doesn't care about flying monkeys, and pay for it via a percentage of contributions. Would we need a permanent staff or could volunteers complete the administrative tasks?

I have nothing useful to offer, but I think this is a great idea. Hopefully knowledgeable posters will be along who can be a bit more helpful than me.

It is indeed ridiculous that it has come to this though.

@Veeta

I have nothing useful to offer, but I think this is a great idea. Hopefully knowledgeable posters will be along who can be a bit more helpful than me.

It is indeed ridiculous that it has come to this though.

Every post is a bump. And it's more of a brainstorm so any ideas welcomed. One of us might (accidentally) say something that makes a techy/legal lurker go "aha! We could do x..."

This is all making me aware that I contributed £50 to a woman who was challenging the inclusion of transwomen on all-women shortlists and have never heard anything about it since.

Not a complaint: this is a fast-moving situation and everything's shifting. But just a reminder of how complicated things can be.

This would be a really good - but I have no idea of the practicalities of making it work.

Who would have imagined that women's rights would be under such attack?

As a slight alternative could we do it as a shopping site where there are various products (eg stickers - or they could even be links to pdfs to avoid postage costs) with prices that would be the donation amount?

So I could buy a “I donated £5 to Keira bell” sticker, or an “I donated £50” or whatever?

@teawamutu

This idea interests me a lot. Hampered by minimal knowledge of business or law, but I adore the idea of a Women's Social and Political Union for the 21st century.

Could we tie in with something massive and uncancellable (my dream: an arm of Lumos, with JKR as patron)?

The Baroness surely knows someone who owns a bank.

Allison Bailey managed it via her own site.

Some sort of group of GC lawyers on retainer? Banks might be less willing to try to part lawyers from their money...

I dream of a Union too. Have said so before. If only.

I'm pretty sure all the tech exists. What we need is a legal identity that is rock solid in law. Then I'm confident we'd be able to do whatever we need.

What is the best sort of legal identity for this?

"Twitter activists" haven't "brought down" any fundraising accounts.

It isn't up to random Twitter people to decide if a money-raising account should be taken down or not. It's up to the people running the platform. Generally they don't want their platform being used for the purpose of raising money for legal fees.

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