“We'd never heard of Harry Brewer, nobody had said to us that he was doing anything. I did the usual thing of saying 'thanks so much and you're ever so generous and that's great'. I didn't really think much more about it I just thought 'I'll check up and see how they're getting on in the morning this kind of weird random online thing. So I went to bed, got up the next morning and I think by then it was about £20,000. I was like oh my god this is amazing.

When Alexandria Ocasio Cortez came on, everything went ballistic. You couldn't even read the messages they were just going so fast.

Obviously the money was amazing, but one of the things that was really obvious when you went on to the stream itself was the messages of support for trans kids and young people.

When you went and looked on the thread literally every couple of seconds there was popping up a 'support trans rights' 'support trans kids' and I saw this and thought this is what families and kids should be looking at, this is what they should be aware of.

Then sort of like Saturday afternoon ...Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez retweeted a tweet that we'd put out saying this is amazing isn't it great. She actually then quote tweeted it and suddenly we saw numbers that were in their hundreds in terms of people on the feed at any one time going up into literally thousands and thousands of people.

One of the first people I tweeted out was Cher, and she retweeted. It was so exciting. When you saw the message stream on Twitch, normally it's really slow, but it was like toilet roll rolling off. It was moving so quickly.

AOC came on, Chelsea Manning as well and Mara Wilson. I went on and spoke to Harry. It must've been about 2 or 3 in the morning. That whole weekend for me is totally surreal now, sitting back and looking at it.

When she [AOC] came on, everything went ballistic. You couldn't even read the messages they were just going so fast. The other thing with AOC/Chelsea Manning/Mara Wilson coming on is that all these young people were hearing this and seeing this as well so it was such a massively positive message after a really crappy couple of months.

At 77k Harry broke down and had a cry because he thought he was going to make £3/4 thousand. He kept on making himself little challenges like "if you make another 10 grand in the next hour then I'll go to the supermarket with ... written on my forehead".

One of the lovely things was that he had this team and they were there running the show while he was sleeping. Actually, one of the most poignant thing was the voices that came through at that time. While he wasn't playing, there was a lot of trans people on talking about their stories. I remember he got a young person and I'd spoken to them [on the helpline] and they said they thought they would've been dead if they hadn't have found someone to talk to who understood. I had a conversation with her as well online and that was really moving.

There was another person who had been desperately crowdfunding for months and months for a wheelchair. By the time they came off the Twitch stream, the wheelchair had been crowdfunded and more.

Essentially, for Mermaids as an organisation, I think we took on five members of staff based on having that much in the bank in terms of unrestricted funding so it gave us a boost. As a small charity, one of the things that is always difficult to have even if you go for grants and apply for projects etc, is actually getting core funding that covers your baseline functions and the salaries. Actually getting on with the general running costs of the charity is one of the hardest things to do and this gave us such an enormous boost and it also allowed us to put people into places that we knew we desperately needed but we just didn't have the funds to be able to do.

We got to the middle of February and then the Lottery confirmed that they were going to give us the grant because they'd looked into all the accusations made against us and found them to be baseless.”