The International Anti-Fascist Defence’s Fund‘s Decisions Crew are the 300+ people in 18 different countries (so far!) that have to make the call on requests the Fund receives.  Recently, the Crew had to say no to one request and yes to another.  Here’s how that looked:

Last month, the Decisions Crew said no to a proposal to donate to a crowdfunding page purported to be backing Louise, an antifascist assaulted by Nathan Damigo – a white supremacist with a criminal record of violent hate crimes.  It was not so much that we had doubts about Louise’s situation, but we had doubts about the crowdfunding page itself.  Specifically, we were unable to verify who set the page up or if they had any connection to Louise at all.  It would be irresponsible for the Defence Fund to contribute to every crowdfunding campaign that claims to be in support of anti-fascists without verifying if that is actually the case.  In fact, one of the reasons the Defence Fund was established in the first place was to provide a verifiable way for people to materially support anti-fascists in trouble.  Unlike anonymous crowdfunding campaigns, the Defence Fund has been endorsed by three different anti-fascist networks;  has a clear, democratic decision-making process in place; and reports regularly on its activities.

But we digress!  In the end, Louise appears to have received the support she needed by others and the mysterious crowdfunding campaign changed its goal to funding an app to help with labor organizing – certainly laudable, but also beyond the mandate of the Defence Fund.

Then earlier this month, the Defence Fund decided via consensus to lend support to T., a Toronto-based anti-fascist that was physically-assaulted on March 4th by Islamophobes when he went to counter their hate rally at city hall.  Adding insult to injury, police charged T. with the attack, putting his volunteer work as a tutor at-risk!  T.  has had to miss some work for court stuff and will likely have to pay a lawyer to get this mess settled, so we were happy to send him some money to help with that.

The International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund is here to help anti-fascists & anti-racists wherever they are whenever they’ve run into trouble as a result of their stand against bigotry and hatred.  As long as we can verify the legitimacy of a request, it’s very likely to be supported.