Stand with Barbara in Her Time of Need

This is a relief fund for our friend Barbara Blackthorne as she gets back on her feet. Barbara was living in Canada, and her personal situation became unsafe for her and she has had to make a quick exit and turn her life upside down to return to the States and start over from scratch.

She is physically safe and back home in the United States and staying with friends and has support from a close circle of us who are helping with her emotional, physical, and logistical recovery. However, given the quickness of this, and the extreme logistics of going between countries, and countless other costs of getting her life back together, she is in need of emergency financial support.

She did not ask us to organize help for her. She has been so humble, strong, and open during all this. But several of us close to her decided we would try to raise some initial funds for her to help her take care of the emergency handling of her situation and help her towards getting back on her feet. We've set a goal of $5000 but this is far under what the reasonable financial burden will be on her through this situation. Every little bit helps, even if you can only share the fundraiser around.

Barbara is an incredible woman, friend, and singer. She brings so much joy to others through her music in the power metal band Empress, through her friendship to others in the metal community, and her strong and loud advocacy for ALL women -- a message she has proudly and loudly represented for as long as we've known her. Now is a chance for us to show up for her, in her time of need. We are lucky she is safely away from the most imminent danger of the situation, but now is when our community needs to come together for her, in the way we know she would be there for us if the tables were turned.

The point of this fundraiser is not to recap her personal situation, but to get immediate help to Barbara.

If you have any questions on the fundraiser specifically, please feel free to direct them here.

Thank you.

If you are struggling with domestic violence, please reach out to your loved ones. We have provided some basic resources below for reference.

Domestic Violence Hotline

https://www.thehotline.org/

Call 1.800.799.SAFE (7233)

https://ncadv.org/get-help