The Illinois Alliance for Reentry and Justice is the network facilitator of a statewide ecosystem of currently and formerly incarcerated people, other directly impacted people, and service providers working to accelerate the transformative realignment of power and accountability to reimagine and remake justice. We are working in community to develop solutions to the problems our partners are currently facing behind the walls along with the problems faced by those on the other side of those walls. This is accomplished through the collective work of community centering lived experience with participatory democracy models toward an abolitionist future.

Public Mobilization is one of our containers of work and it is through this container that we are politicizing the public to shift the power dynamics between marginalized communities and their government as well as promote the demand for co-governance between these systematically otherized communities and government.

Our motto is, “By Community, For Community, In Community.” This is because we understand that the work needed to bring about “the Beloved Community” that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. imprinted on our imaginations requires community solutions developed by those impacted, for those impacted, and with those impacted.