UNSETTLED met with Match Montana, the founder of Home Safe London last week to talk about the campaign that took over everyone's Instagram feeds. You've seen the post:
How did the campaign come about?
"This came up when the Sarah Everard event took place, when there was a big, big, big push in the media. Which is great, because it needed to happen but from that I just saw that from a guy's point of view, I saw a lot of people I know - a lot of my mates were not sharing those posts or actively speaking out on it. It was sad to see that not a lot of guys were pushing it when in essence, it's our fault. It's our mates who are doing these things that some people know, or a lot of us probably don't know about. And it's our responsibility to get them to really, really take this seriously.
A lot of my girl mates would choose to take the bus or walk home at night because it's too expensive to take a taxi and so I thought: how can we alleviate this cost for these girls?
Especially for those who work till 2am or 3am and don't want to take a taxi because a £15 taxi is two hours of their work being taken out? So the aim is to alleviate “the financial stress” for people who cannot afford to get a taxi home by refunding the cost of their trip."
What needs to be done for there to be more awareness? And what can we do?
"I feel like lots needs to be read. There needs to be a lot more education about this. A lot more time and focus put into things such as, what to do when your mate can't get home, offer to walk her home, get her Uber or offer people to stay around yours. Fair enough, you would've taken a £25 hit and you might be broke but realistically you would probably spend that on five pints at the pub. What's more important? The safety of your mate or five pints?
"I've never been worried about going out clubbing I've never had to. I've never, ever had times where I've been scared to walk through a place to walk home late at night."
I know it sounds cheeky to ask but please just share everything. If you have contacts or people with large following - please encourage them to share this so that we can make this possible.
Keep sharing and ask people to donate even if you can't. Even a fiver can cover half the journey for someone or in some instances, a full journey! We want to take this to a point where we are making actual actual change where this is an ongoing campaign. Either we run it ourselves or we run it in partnership with Uber but we want this accessible to anyone who needs it."
Please take the time to donate to Home Safe's campaign here.
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