The Value of Your Support
#GivingTuesday is next week and we’re celebrating the successes funded through your donations.
Here are four things your donations supported this fall at Chicago Appleseed.
- We had a major victory in preserving and expanding the hearing officer program in the domestic relations/child support courts in Cook County. Working with Presiding Judge Dickler’s Domestic Relations Task Force has been rewarding. The commitment to justice and desire for improvement of the court personnel, the private bar, legal aid attorneys and agency staff has been impressive. In 2017, staff attorney Elizabeth Monkus will continue representing Chicago Appleseed on the Task Force and will work with pro bono counsel to develop community resources for families navigating the divorce and child support courts.
- Ali Abid, staff attorney, convened the second and third meetings of the steering committee for the North Lawndale Restorative Justice Community Court and the weekly executive committee calls. After a fulltime coordinator for the project was hired under a Center for Court Innovation in October, Ali has stepped back to a smaller role on various management working groups and teams for the project. He will continue in those roles while the project works toward a 2017 launch.
- Sharlyn Grace, criminal justice policy analyst, gave testimony at the Cook County Board budget hearing which helped defeat a budget amendment which would expand the practice of using bond money collected by the Clerk of Court to reimburse the county for representation by the public defender or other court-appointed counsel. Our advocacy toward ending money bail in Cook County has come at an exciting and fast-moving time and we’re grateful for Sharlyn’s contributions to our staff.
- Pro bono attorneys at Golberg Kohn worked with the Collaboration for Justice to submit a statement in support of a proposed Illinois court rule change to end the practice of presumptively shackling children and adolescents appearing in juvenile court. The Court adopted the rule change at the beginning of November 2016.
This is just a sampling of our 2016 work.
Your monetary support and work from our pro bono partners have propelled Chicago Appleseed’s advocacy to reform the system of court costs, fines and fees in Illinois; to push for digital court recording in all courtrooms both to preserve appellate rights and monitor the treatment of all litigants; and efforts with the Collaboration for Justice to improve police accountability in Cook County by engaging with the Police Accountability Task Force.
The support for our community has facilitated our collaboration with other Appleseed centers on a project to increase representation in deportation courts across the U.S. It has allowed us to engage with groups concerned about promoting judicial diversity. The generosity of donors has kept us engaged with the ongoing charge to change how drug arrests are handled, both through the Access to Community Treatment Court and the pilot program for field testing of suspected drugs in Cook County.
We believe our progress shows that a donation to Chicago Appleseed goes a long way!
We hope you’ll consider including us in your #GivingTuesday. An anonymous donor has pledged a $40,000 matching gift for our end of the year campaign and we’re just over halfway there! All donations of any size made before December 31, 2016 will count toward the match.