Hello Friends! Help!

7 April 2013

Stranded! Ten activists from Toronto and Hamilton, including my colleague and fellow @occupybaystreet tweeter @nursegirlt, have been stranded in a snowstorm on the way back from Operation Thunderbird (#OpTB or #OpThunderbird on twitter) rallies in Thunder Bay, Ontario. The roads became impassable 20 minutes outside Wawa, ON (about two hours Northwest of Sault Ste Marie, ON), and the group turned back and found a hotel for the night in Wawa. The additional costs associated with this stranding for the trip run as follows: $375 Saturday Night in hotel (3 rooms @ $115 each plus taxes) $65 Additional Night for rental cars $100 Food at $10/da per activists (food for previous days was covered by activists themselves) $540 TOTAL Other Leftover Trip Costs Also, Operation Thunderbird Organizers have provided us w/ a preliminary look at their final costs for helping nearly two dozen activists get to Thunder Bay to speak out about Missing, Murdered, and Sexually Assaulted Indigenous Women in Canada. Organizers had difficulty raising funds online as they have attempted to remain anonymous (for reasons including that the previous campaign of this sort in Thunder Bay saw the organizer's house ransacked by Thunder Bay Police). IndieGoGo also froze and shut down an attempt to raise funds at their site. Organizers were loathe to continue when they realized that IndieGoGo's terms of service explicitly state that they share information with law enforcement in North America, even without a warrant. This is appalling, particularly since OpThunderbird is functioning to criticize Thunder Bay Police's mistreatment of Indigenous Women. Organizers for OpThunderbird were able to raise about $2000 through generous friends, family, and colleagues, but the trip costs (before the snow storm stranding) are reasonably estimated to be just under $4000.00 (estimation is necessary because, e.g., the last 1000 kms of gas cannot yet be tallied). $500 Trip Organizers from Winnipeg (estimated) $110 Trip Organizers from Kenora (estimated) $400 General trip organizer #1 (US based, exact cost, hotel payments + $85 general funding) $645 OBS organizers (cost of masks plus transportation costs to and from Thunder Bay) $1755 How You Can Donate My Paypal account (recently reactivated to contribute to funds to report on ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people taking place in Burma) can accept funds. Email for PayPal payments is djjohnso yahoo dot com. BitCoin: we are attempting to use BitCoin for the first time! 1D9jruipDdDpVsTbi1cKAfpY8b6TCncHJq is the address for OpThunderbird's emergency fundraiser. Thanks for considering helping out! Funds will first go 1 st to cover the storm stranding. Doug Johnson Hatlem for @OccupyBayStreet P.S. I myself was on the trip and at the rallies in Thunder Bay, but had to fly back early to meet a work engagement.