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.

"whose aim is to defend internet freedom"

If a person allegedly posts personal information and false information about a police officer for an example, that isn't exactly "internet freedom" is it?

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
Standing for Women already does this, I'm not sure I'd want to divert their funding.
Might be worth asking Posie who handles her payments though.

Electronic Freedom Foundation are a bunch of open-source, free speech geeks whose aim is to defend internet freedom. they have tools & recommendations on their website ...
Good idea, I even linked to an article of theirs recently. I'll have a look. Thanks.

What is the best sort of legal identity for this?

Any lawyers out there?

Generally they don't want their platform being used for the purpose of raising money for legal fees.

Maybe Crowd Justice should change their name then!

Any organisation can instruct and pay for lawyers. The issue is whether the law firm can accept and process the funds (e.g for anti-money laundering or conflict reasons).

Where there is transparent funding (as there is likely to be here) there isn’t likely to be a technical or legal issue with engaging lawyers or instructing them. More of an issue is finding a law firm who will take on this particular client - although that probably wouldn’t be too hard.

But to answer the ‘what identity’ question, it might be best to get advice from a charities lawyer - a women’s rights justice fund charity may be the way to go. (Not my area of expertise, sorry!)

Thank you! Would be good to know what requirements there are to setting up as a charity. I know LGB Alliance have managed it recently but the Charities Commission faced a lot of negative feedback from ill-informed people.

I think I've seen it said somewhere before that the law firms can't take payments from something (I'm not sure what) but I'm not sure why that is, as, for instance, I've seen animal charities have accounts at vets and people can donate straight into that account.

@PersonaNonGarter

But to answer the ‘what identity’ question, it might be best to get advice from a charities lawyer - a women’s rights justice fund charity may be the way to go. (Not my area of expertise, sorry!)

There's the Centre for Women's Justice - I support them on Amazon Smile.

@parietal

Electronic Freedom Foundation are a bunch of open-source, free speech geeks whose aim is to defend internet freedom. they have tools & recommendations on their website ...

I don’t think we’ll get support from EFF, Jeremy Malcolm executive director of Prostasia (see this thread www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3608751-Prostasia-Foundation-Child-protection-or-dismantling-Safeguarding) used to be global policy analyst at EFF and still has connections there

@SciFiScream

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?

A charity I think. I'm all for a union but the hoops to jump through might be too big. A charity needs much less. Still there are problems with a charity too. If I gave (say) 50 quid to potentially go to kiera bell and the charity decided another cause needed it more I might be pissed off, cos I dont have many 50 quids.

Generally they don't want their platform being used for the purpose of raising money for legal fees.

Oh come on we all know that is absolute nonsense. One high profile example, Christian Jessen is crowdfunding to pay his libel costs to Arlene Foster.

There's the Centre for Women's Justice - I support them on Amazon Smile
I wish more people knew about Amazon smile.
I donate to the royal British legion through it and actually didnt realise cfwj was on the list. I might change.

I know Amazon bad and all but if everyone used smile and picked a charity those charities would be much better off.
Could we somehow bring smile to more prominence whilst we are sorting out womens funding.
Also if we create a charity could we get it on the smile list? Then we could easily donate without actually giving money and I seriously doubt any group could prevent Amazon receiving monies and passing it on. It's too big for threats to work.

Women's crowdfunder site - supported Giggle after initial deplatforming: www.liftwomen.com/

@Congressdingo you'd give a restricted donation to the legal fund. Then it cannot be used for anything else.

I still think that instead of setting up a centralised platform, we could made it easy for each person who needs funding to set up their own funding platform, hosted on the cloud.

Then there's no centralised admin, no need to verify specific campaigns.

It's just a matter of making and distributing something simple enough for non-techies to set up themselves (the tech all exists). And then making sure that the instructions aren't interfered with.

JustWaking totally understand what you're saying and it makes sense but again the issue of nervous payment processors crops up.
You could set up the customisable platform and Stripe or whoever could cut and run.

teawamutu have you got a link for the Centre for Women's Justice? Is this it? www.centreforwomensjustice.org.uk/

If so it looks a bit like what we were talking about, ready-made.

They seem to be focused on VAWG, therefore less "controversial" than fighting gender ideology in the courts but it might be good to find out who they set up as a charity and whether they are interested in pursuing different cases. Again, I wouldn't want to detract from what they are already doing.

Ts and Cs have a transgender policy but make it clear all in accordance with EA10.

@MargaritaPie

"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.

Crowd Justice can't say that and they hampered Allison Bailey, preventing her using the stretch facility didn't they?