Meet our Head of Movement Building and Policy, Eva
Hi everyone! My name is Eva Blum-Dumontet. Three months ago I joined Chayn as Head of Movement Building and Policy and I am finally taking the time to introduce myself properly to tell you a little bit more about me and what I will be doing at Chayn.
First of all, a bit about me… In a previous life I used to be a journalist covering tech issues and European affairs. I left journalism to work for the London-based NGO Privacy International, where I worked for eight years as a senior researcher and project manager. I conducted investigations on government and corporate surveillance across the world and its impact on human rights. I also authored a report and numerous articles on the intersection of gender, privacy, and technology and built bridges between organisations working on gender issues and organisations working on digital rights.
The work I am most proud of over the course of those eight years was leading an investigation into the data sharing practices of menstruation apps. The investigation was covered by media organisations worldwide and led the menstruation apps we exposed to change their practices, guaranteeing better privacy protections for their millions of users.
After I left Privacy International, I joined the data and digital technology policy team at the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences. I worked as a senior policy adviser to develop the Royal Society’s work on the impact of AI on scientific research.
With my background in digital rights, it is fair to say that tech-facilitated gender-based violence will be at the heart of my work at Chayn. It is an issue I care a lot about, as I believe it has become impossible to work on gender-based violence in today’s world without comprehending the role that technology plays in it.
The good news is that Chayn has always been at the forefront on this topic and we have done fantastic work with the Orbits report, a guide filled with policy recommendations for companies, governments and researchers. We also have a brand new course on image-based abuse available on Bloom that we launched on 18 October.
Doing movement building work on tech-facilitated gender-based violence will allow more and more survivors to find out and gain access to our services and will ensure organisations working on gender-based violence and organisations working on digital rights can mutually benefit from one another’s knowledge and expertise.
And with more and more legislation coming up to regulate AI and our online lives, there will be a lot of room for Chayn to also influence policy making across the world.
Beyond tech-facilitated gender based violence, I also hope to support Chayn in extending its reach in the Global South to ensure we can carry on reaching a wide range of users from every part of the world. This is work that can only happen as a result of partnerships building with local organisations.
Finally, another topic that will be on the horizon for me in the coming months will be movement building around trauma-informed practices. Our CEO Hera Hussain ran a hugely successful workshop on trauma-informed design and there has been a lot of appetite for more of those, we have heard you and we will deliver!
Internally as an organisation, we spend a lot of time thinking about what trauma-informed HR should look like and we cannot wait to share those thoughts with you. If you’re interested in exploring these practices within your own organisation, we’ll have exciting content coming up for you soon!
So please make sure you follow Chayn on your social media platform of choice, as we will be sharing updates about the movement building and policy work. And you can find me on Twitter (although I am trying to limit the time I spend there) @Arcadian_O, on LinkedIn and on Bluesky.
