It seems risky to set this up on something you own when facing the adversary you face. Use good OPSEC. Don't do this on something than can be tied to you. Not on your servers, not from your workstations, not from your house, not from your workplace. That's 101 level operational security. It'd just take one user to be discovered using the VPN, followed by forensics and interrogation to unmask whoever sets this up. The…
When you focus on setting up servers, you can argue it is mainly about communication.
They cannot go after anyone who wants to be online again - but of course they will go after anyone, who set up infrastructure especially for activists.
I would frame it internally strictly as "going online".