In terms of being sponsored, we haven't been sponsored. Our organization has been running with zero dollars for the past seven years. It's a completely volunteer organization. Part of the reason—and I know this has changed recently—is that we are not registered as a charity, so we couldn't actually access funds. Most of the work we were doing was actually political advocacy.
I know that this changed relatively recently. The only source of funding we've had was from benefit concerts, and that actually went to the Roma to pay for the legal fees of Roma refugees.
That being said, in terms of the words you mentioned, that statement came as a result of the work we're doing with Global Affairs and Minister Freeland's office. We requested that the statement be made in light of the commitment for the recognition of the Romani genocide. That's just to give you the background. We have asked the Canadian government to recognize officially the Romani genocide and declare August 2 as the official day of commemoration of the Romani genocide.
With that, we asked for a commitment to address the ongoing human rights violations of Roma across the world. As part of that commitment, we are working with Global Affairs to see what can be done. I can say that the situation in terms of human rights has been a much easier situation in terms of the government response to take steps. The recognition, however, has been very, very difficult in terms of getting the government to adopt an official act of Parliament to officially recognize the Romani genocide. As it stands right now, it remains a statement whereby the government commits or it recognizes the Romani genocide, but there's no act of Parliament officially recognizing it. That's what we're working on now.
I think that what the government can do more of is to speak out about these situations. We haven't seen statements from the government about all these situations. We do address that regularly with Global Affairs. Whenever there is a situation, we send an email. Also, we raise awareness, both with our own MPs in Montreal but also at the federal level, and at the international level as well. Those are two concrete things that can be done.