Crowdfunding sites have been popular enough to raise money for everything from medical bills to hair products and even a US$55,000 potato salad. But activists have maintained there’s no platform out there that allows one to raise money for anything related to criminal charges, for instance to collect money for bail.
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But a new site could change all that.
The group behind Support.fm have teamed up with LGBTQ and immigration activists and web developers to launch a crowdfunding site set up specifically for LGBTQ locked up in jail, prison, or immigrant detention centers.
“We wanted to support the work of queer and trans activists who are already doing imperative grassroots work, especially in communities of color and low-income communities,” Grace Dunham, a writer and activist who is part of the team behind Support.fm, told Fusion.
“I lay no claims to this being our brilliant idea,” Dunham clarified. “It’s much more about observing extremely transformative work that’s already being done by activists and thinking about ways to support that work.”
But the Support.fm team needs to raise funds themselves in order to make this project a reality. They launched their own crowdfunding campaign on generosity.com last week and have since raised about US$4,000, which is nearly 8 percent of their goal.
“We will work at whatever pace we get money,” Dunham shared but added, “Ideally we would have a working beta site six months from now.”
The project is imperative because defense lawyers and scholars say the U.S. bail system severely disadvantages poor people, who, when they are unable to come up with the funds to post bail, end up spending more time in jail than they have to.
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It can also be especially hard for incarcerated LGBTQ people.
“The reality is that LGBTQ people are more likely to be disconnected from their family of origin because of homophobia and transphobia,” said Rev. Jason Lydon, director of Black & Pink, a group that raises money to bail out members of the LGBTQ community and people who are HIV-positive, as reported by Fusion.
Detention can also be more dangerous for LGBTQ people because of higher rates of physical and sexual violence in prison. As a result, many are isolated from other prison population, but the psychological affects of this can also be just as severe.
“(Support.fm) is exactly what we need at the moment,” said Jennicet Gutiérrez, an organizer with Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement, a Los Angeles-based groups that works to get LGBTQ detainees out of immigration detention centers, in an interview with Fusion.
Dunham pressed that the Support.fm team is about creating an LGBTQ movement that doesn’t leave anyone behind, especially queer and trans people “who are targeted by police because they are black, Latinx, and indigenous, because they are disabled, because they do sex work, and so much more.”
Dunham also added that the site will be different than other crowdfunding sites in several ways. It will be free for users and won’t seek profits from successful campaigns.
“The familiar tropes of crowdfunding sites—timelines, deadlines, and penalties if you don’t reach your goal—will have no place on Support.fm,” she added.