TJN granted funds for communications strategy

The more observant amongst you will have noticed the increased press coverage of tax havens and tax justice. This has not happened overnight. For years we have patiently built relationships with senior financial journalists in selected media throughout Europe, the Americas, and Africa. Less so, in Asia and Australia, though we've been making headway on both of those continents in the past 12 months.

We have now been awarded a three year grant from our friends at the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust to carry forward this outreach work. Our medium term goal is to broaden our target audiences to give the battle against tax havens and abusive tax policies a more mainstream base. Specifically this grant will fund the development of an integrated package of educational and outreach materials, including a feature film (already under research and scheduled to go into production later this year), a major new book (already underway with publishers Random House), websites, blogs, outreach teams, and so on.

The goal of this strategy is perfectly simple. We plan to build sufficient strength of public opinion behind our proposals for substantial reform of the global financial markets to outweigh the massive lobbying (and party political funding) efforts of those who want to protect the interests of the tax havens and the tax avoidance industry. This will be a mammoth task: there is little public knowledge about how tax havens have contributed to global crisis or worsened poverty and inequality. We aim to rectify this gap in public understanding. Thanks to the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust for their support and encouragement.