Sending solidarity and strength to each of you as we continue the work of surviving, fighting for freedom, organizing for justice, and caring for our personal and collective well-being. Here at Chicago Community Bond Fund, our Board of Directors continue to carry out our sunsetting plan. In the past year, CCBF redistributed returned bond monies to our partners, including the National Bail Fund Network, Midwest Immigration Bond Fund, Believers Bail Out, and the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice. We also worked with Crossroads Fund to pilot our first year of the Chainbreaker Fund which distributed grants to local Chicago-based organizations practicing abolition and caring for our neighbors on the inside and outside. It is an incredibly powerful thing to redistribute the donations you all gave to CCBF and ensure more folks can get out of jail or receive a book in prison or access resources and support while fighting a case. 

A couple updates and logistics we want to share with you all as we continue our sunsetting process:

Newsletter subscription: We want to give a heads up for everyone on our main CCBF email list: Going forward, you will receive updates from the Illinois Network for Pretrial Justice (INPJ). CCBF was a part of the founding of the Coalition to End Money Bond as well as INPJ, and we want to ensure INPJ can reach our wider community for critical updates and action alerts to defend the Pretrial Fairness Act and other wins. If you want to opt out of future emails, simply click on the “unsubscribe from this list” link at the very bottom of a recent CCBF Mailchimp newsletter.

Current donors: If you are a current donor to CCBF, your contribution goes toward our administrative work to facilitate the Chainbreaker Fund and its advisory committee, track resolved and open cases in which CCBF paid bond, and maintain baseline operations for a nonprofit. Please email info@chicagobond.org for any questions about donations.

CCBF tees: Have you misplaced your CCBF t-shirt? Don’t worry, we still have t-shirts in the office and are happy to distribute them. Email info@chicagobond.org to set up a time you can swing by and pick one up!

There is a lot of work happening to protect the Pretrial Fairness Act and work for pretrial freedom for our community members. We hope you look forward to the coming messages and action alerts from INPJ, and we encourage you all to read their recent report, Changing Landscapes: Community Court-watchers’ Observations of the Second Year of Pretrial Fairness Act Implementation. We will keep updates on the blog when we can, thanks for reading.