Fund Public Interest Investigations

Between October - December 2016, a volunteer-run community watch initiative was conducted in consultation with members of the Toronto transgender/nonbinary community.

Overhead for this investigation was funded completely out-of-pocket. No organizations or individual donors sponsored this initiative. At times volunteers were required to field their own expenses.

Quality investigations are extremely overhead-intensive. A/V equipment is required to capture evidence. Many incidental expenses can be incurred, such as transportation and clothing purchased for surveillance outings. Information storage is a major expense that the project often struggled to keep up with. All organizing and reporting of information was performed using open-source software, which at times is buggy and produces suboptimal results.

With financial support of $3000, future such public interest reports can be produced and circulated free of charge. The breakdown of expenses is as follows:

• Approximately 1/3 will go to membership in professional organizations, closed listserv subscriptions, and training materials. This will provide access to better quality information and help professionalize tactics used in future investigations;

• Approximately 1/3 will go toward secure data storage, including purchasing physical data storage media, purchasing subscriptions to cloud storage services, and paying safe deposit box fees for secure physical storage of hardcopies. $1000 may seem like a lot to spend just on data storage, but when you are constantly recording and archiving high-definition footage, costs will run up very quickly;

• Approximately 1/3 will go toward professionalizing and weatherproofing A/V equipment. $1000 is not a lot to spend on A/V equipment, and camera lenses alone can easily cost double or triple that amount. Better A/V equipment will mean better quality recordings, which in turn will mean better quality reports available to the public.

Funds raised in excess of $3000 will be put toward living expenses, meaning that less time will be spent seeking clients and more time will be spent on pro-bono investigations contributing to the public good.

In the event that funds are raised in excess of $15000, additional money will be put toward sponsoring the training and licensing of dual license private investigators/security guards drawn from members of the activist community.