Reparations for the 'Everything Room' at University of Otago

Everything Room Benefit Gala

15 September 2023

The cuts to education roll on, as does our fundraising.

The university wants the protestors to pay $15,000 in reparations, this is the price tag for keeping the issue out of criminal proceedings. This is a brutal figure (a figure that includes whiteboard damage and trash removal??), but with your support we have some confidence that we can find a way to reach it. That price must be paid very soon, so we'll borrow some money to buy us a bit more time.

One of the key drivers behind the protest was the concept of ‘everything’ - that you cannot separate a staff member from losing their job or a student losing their course from wider societal issues, everything from financial mismanagement to government underfunding to the climate crisis.

To help in raising the money, we have organised an Everything Room Benefit Gala to be held at our local cooperative, Yours (43 Moray Place), from 3 PM on Friday 17th November.

Like the protest, the benefit gala is open to everything. Anything you could do to help keep student protesters out of court would be a fantastic and deeply felt display of solidarity.

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A thank you, and a development

1 September 2023

Thank you to all who have given. Truly. This is what social solidarity looks like in action: fighting on different fronts to protect a public good, and supporting one another when we're retaliated against.

The good news: our trio have been offered diversion by the courts, which means this drama will not appear on their criminal records.

The bad news: this is dependent on their payment of $15,000 in six weeks. POAG and TEU made brief statements to the media, an excerpt is in the attached images.

We'll be running a handful of events over the next month, and will keep this page open until early October to facilitate the fundraising.