The OVD-Info project needs to raise one million rubles (about $15,000 at the time) to support the work of its monitoring team.
The money is needed for technical support for a 24/7 multi-line hotline and to pay four staff members who work in shifts. They take calls, interview people seeking help, write news reports about repression and detentions, and help people understand what to do in stressful situations: in a police van, during interrogation, or while a home is being searched. The hotline staff connect callers with lawyers and do a great deal of other work documenting and analyzing various cases of repression in Russia.
OVD-Info’s hotline has been operating since the very first mass protest rallies of 2011–2012. From May 2014 to July 2016 alone, OVD-Info staff handled 3,200 calls totaling 4,725 minutes, and the media used OVD-Info’s information more than 8,600 times. Over the course of its work, OVD-Info has documented more than 10,000 detentions at public events, along with many other forms of persecution, across 82 regions of Russia.
You can support OVD-Info here.
The monitoring team’s budget is available here.
Reports on how the crowdfunded money was spent for April and July 2016: https://ovdinfo.org/reports/crf-2016 https://ovdinfo.org/reports/crf-2016-2
Personally, I’m going to send them 1,000 rubles (about $15 at the time); good people are doing valuable work.