Collaborations

Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts participates in an Anti-Gender-Based Violence (GBV) Legislative Advocacy Committee. This coalition includes local legal aid and anti-sexual assault/domestic violence social service providers meeting regularly to share advocate updates, feedback, and cross-collaboration from civil, criminal, and criminalized survivor legal advocacy spaces.

As a group, we support policy advocacy of member organizations and ensure survivors’ advocates are represented in the larger criminal justice and civil court reform movements.

The Chicago Data Collaborative is a cooperative effort by newsrooms, academics, and nonprofit researchers to help each other understand our criminal legal system. The group works together to gather and organize data from public agencies in an effort to paint a comprehensive picture of the criminal legal system as a whole.

The Chicago Data Collaborative includes Injustice Watch, DataMade, Invisible Institute, Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts, Lucy Parsons Labs, Metropolitan Planning Council, Northwestern’s Bluhm Legal Clinic, The Chicago Reporter, Adler University, and City Tech Collaborative.

For more information on the Chicago Data Collaborative, you can visit its website.

The goal of the Coalition to End Asset Forfeiture is to advocate to limit and ultimately end civil forfeiture in Chicago and throughout Illinois.

The Coalition includes Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts, the Chicago Council of Lawyers, the ACLU of Illinois, Lucy Parsons Labs, the Institute for Justice, and several pro bono advocates.

Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts, the Chicago Council of Lawyers, the Exoneration Project, the Chicago Bar Foundation, Cabrini Green Legal Aid, and individual advocates created the Coalition to End Fines and Fees, which helped pass the Criminal and Traffic Assessment Act (CTAA) in 2019 and have continued to advocate for its efficacy.

The goal of the Coalition to End Money Bond and the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice (INPJ) is to end wealth-based incarceration and significantly reduce pretrial detention in Illinois.

Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts was a founding member of the Coalition to End Money Bond in 2016; in 2020, the Illinois General Assembly ended money bond in Illinois, effective 2023, and we remain a key partner in helping implement that policy.

The Coalition to End Money Bond is a member of the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice and includes: ACLU of Illinois, A Just Harvest, Believer’s Bail Out, Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts, Chicago Community Bond Fund, Community Renewal Society, Illinois Justice Project, Chicago Metropolitan Association of the Illinois Conference of the United Church of Christ, Nehemiah Trinity Rising, The Next Movement, Shriver Center of Poverty Law, The People’s Lobby, SOUL, and the Workers Center for Racial Justice.

You can find the website for these coalitions at endmoneybond.org.

The goal of the Coalition to Ensure a Court Record convened with the goal to ensure all eviction courtrooms in Cook County are recorded and transcribed or staffed with a court reporter. In 2019, we successfully advocated for the trial courtrooms in eviction matters to have court recording equipment and continue to work to expand that progress.

The Coalition to Ensure a Court Record includes Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts, the Chicago Council of Lawyers, CGLA, the Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing, Legal Aid Chicago, Uptown People’s Law Center, Chicago Volunteer Legal Services, and Catholic Charities.

The Illinois Blueprint for Peace is a growing coalition of organizations and individuals committed to supporting and advocating for proven approaches to bring peace and healing to our communities. The Coalition opposes “solutions” to gun violence such as policing, criminalization, and incarceration – which have caused continued harm in the name of “public safety” – and proposes anti-racist and decarceral policies focused on health, healing, and investment in community-led alternative conflict resolution initiatives.

You can find more information about the coalition at its website.

The Judicial Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Coalition is a group of advocates and journalists who are working together to make Illinois’ judiciary more transparent. Under current law, Illinois Courts — and all entities supervised by our courts, including probation departments, juvenile detention centers, and many other agencies — are not subject to Freedom of Information Act laws the way their counterpart agencies in the executive and legislative branches are. This leads to an unacceptably low level of transparency and data access and makes access to even basic information about the functioning of our courts difficult or impossible.

Nearly all other states have judicial transparency laws; The Judicial FOIA Coalition seeks administrative and legislative solutions to this problem, so that Illinois can join the rest of the country in having reasonable access to information about our courts. 

The goal of the Reducing Barriers to Recovery Coalition is to end the over-incarceration of people convicted of drug-related felonies.

The Reducing Barriers to Recovery Coalition includes the ACLU of Illinois, Communities United, Chicago Urban League, The Perfectly Flawed Foundation, Heartland Alliance, TASC (Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities), CGLA, The Law Office of the Cook County Public Defender, the Cook County Justice Advisory Council, the Shriver Center on Poverty Law, Live 4 Lali, the Illinois Justice Project, and Learn 4 Life.

The goal of the #StopShotSpotter Coalition is to urge the Chicago City Council to cancel the city’s contract with ShotSpotter. ShotSpotter is a audio surveillance technology that supposedly informs the Chicago Police Department (CPD) of gunshots, but continually misreports (for firecrackers, car engines backfiring, etc.) and has led to fatal interactions for community members with CPD. The MacArthur Justice Center and Office of the Inspector General found that ShotSpotter unnecessarily creates dangerous situations primarily in Black and brown neighborhoods and encourages CPD officers to engage in abusive, unconstitutional policing practices.

The #StopShotSpotter Coalition is focused on ending the use of this technology and includes ACRE, BYP 100, the Defund CPD Campaign, Lucy Parsons Labs, and others.

The Transit Table Coalition is a group of social service providers, advocates, and other stakeholders working to eliminate transportation barriers that keep people out of work and in poverty. The Transit Table has focused on driver’s license suspensions, excessive ticketing and fines, and other regressive, driving-related punishments. We made incredible progress by passing the License to Work Act, which cleared 75,000 license suspensions, and portions of the SAFE-T Act that limit ticketing for non-driving related financial punishments.

The Transit Table Coalition was founded by the Chicago Jobs Council and includes the ACLU of Illinois, Chicago Appleseed Center for Fair Courts, Chicago Urban League, Community Organizing and Family Issues (COFI), Employment & Employer Services, Growing Home, Heartland Alliance for Human Needs & Human Rights, Illinois Asset Building Group, Jane Addams Resource Corporation, North Lawndale Employment Network, Revolution Workshop, Shriver Center on Poverty Law, and the Woodstock Institute.

You can find more information about the Transit Table Coalition here.

The Pretrial Fairness Act, passed in January 2021, eliminates money bond and fundamentally changes most aspects of Illinois’ pretrial justice system. Several workgroups designing the implementation of the Pretrial Fairness Act have been convened at both the state and county level to help Illinois successfully implement this groundbreaking legislation.

Chicago Appleseed staff are members of Cook County working groups on First Appearances in Court and Pretrial Decision-Making, as well as the statewide working group tasked with creating Guidelines for Statewide Implementation. 

The goal of the Illinois Supreme Court’s Statutory Court Fees Task Force is to “conduct a thorough review of the various statutory fees imposed or assessed on criminal defendants and civil litigants,” including the impact of the Criminal and Traffic Assessment Act (CTAA). The Criminal and Traffic Assessment Act created full and partial criminal court fee waivers for people experiencing economic hardship.

The Illinois Supreme Court Statutory Court Fees Task Force consists of seven people appointed by the Illinois Supreme Court, four members of the Illinois General Assembly, two members of the Illinois Association of Circuit Court Clerks, and two people appointed by the Governor. Jonathan Pilsner, a co-chair of the Collaboration for Justice’s Criminal Legal System Advisory Committee and attorney with the Office of the Appellate Defender, was appointed to the Court Fees Task Force by the Governor.

The Circuit Court of Cook County Committee on Domestic Violence Court was reestablished by Chief Judge Timothy C. Evans on October 6, 2021 to “review practices and procedures governing the hearing of domestic violence matters throughout the court, and review the organization and efficiency of Domestic Violence Division operations at all courthouses where domestic violence matters are heard.”

The Committee, under Chair Judge Grace G. Dickler’s leadership, was charged with making recommendations to the Chief Judge on additional improvements needed to help protect the safety of victims of domestic violence and the rights of those accused after its examination of the current operations. Further, the Committee and other stakeholders were directed to work with the Chief Judge’s Office to establish after-hours court operations in which on-call judges are available to hear petitions for emergency protective orders during the weekdays outside of regular court hours, on weekends, and over holidays.

Since the Committee’s establishment in October, the Committee met numerous times to identify issues, discuss solutions, and solidify its recommendations.