Forthcoming Friends of Lulu Press Release
OK, here's the skinny. We have a press release that is simply waiting for the remainder of the board to sign off on it, and will probably be released over the next couple of days. I have permission to give a mini-update, so here we go!
Basically, I spent (and I DO NOT exaggerate) about 6 hours crawling over the internet looking for the refund offer that Ronee had assured the board members that she had posted, way back when. I can't find anything. So, Shannon and I discussed it, and what we've decided to do is give all fund contributors full refunds. We contacted PayPal and, according to the customer service representative we spoke with, these refunds should go through over the next couple of days. If you contributed to the fund, and you do not receive your refund after about a week, please contact either myself (you can post here or grab my email off my Profile page) or the board at: board [AT] friends-lulu [DOT] org. I will be following up with PayPal either way to make sure things are progressing the way they told me things would.
This also leads into something else I wanted to talk about. I feel (only my opinion and I could be wrong) that a lot (though not all) of the rancor leveled against Friends of Lulu is based on the fact that Ronee's name has become inextricably linked to the Empowerment Fund. There is also the bad timing to add into the mix: the board doing it's regular turn-over in the Fall, the fact that Ronee took off and refuses to respond to emails from myself and other board members, the amount of time it took us to prepare and begin making statements, etc). I still think that a lot of it goes back to the piss-poor way Ronee conducted both herself and everything related to this fund.
Ronee has victimized a lot of people, something which is becoming very apparent to me now as I uncover more and more information, and I would like to point out that, at the end of the day, I and the other board members were her victims, too. Ronee misrepresented everything relating to the Empowerment Fund to us from the first step onward, announced the Fund without our permission and, as soon as she had achieved the notoriety she felt she deserved, dumped the whole thing in our laps and took off, leaving us to poke through everything and try to piece together shards of disparate information.
I know that Johanna of ComicsWorthReading mentioned recently that she has contacted Ronee for a statement and is waiting for a response. I hope other reporters follow this trend, and I hope Ronee does say SOMETHING. I think she has a lot to answer for.
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
ldragoon) wrote,
