November is a month where we in the US have gratitude and community on our minds as we reflect on the changing of the seasons and plan on spending time with family and friends around warm food and festive beverages. And while we know most of our attorneys are looking forward to the court lull around the end of the year, we are still full steam ahead here at Smokeball!
Today, November 12, in between our normal workflow, our available teams across departments gathered for a Lunch & Learn session with a local non-profit that is very dear to several of us on staff: The Illinois Prison Project.
The event was arranged by our Office Manager Lauren, with a connect from everyone’s favorite Smokeball celebrity, our own Sara Sultan. IPP is led by Executive Director Jenny Soble, who has been a powerhouse in the second chance community here in Chicago and greater Illinois. She built IPP from the ground up, staffed it with lawyers armed with expertise in post-conviction work and dogged determination, and then hired their former clients to join their staff and continue this excellent mission. IPP offers post-conviction work, as people in prison are not entitled to a lawyer the way they are pre-conviction, as well as advocacy and education.
We met with Marshan Allen, Director of Policy and Communications, and Jessica Daniels, Education Program Manager, to learn more about the great work they do supporting incarcerated people and their communities who love them, and to see how Smokeball can support these efforts. Marshan and Jessica answered staff questions and taught us about things like the felony murder rule, how people convicted of crimes get assigned to prisons in Illinois, the appalling conditions of incarceration that should not be contemplated as merely “part of the sentence,” and the initiatives that formerly incarcerated IPP staff manage that provide for incarcerated community members and their loved ones.
At Smokeball, we know our mission is to power people law: to support those of you that use your legal experience to help hold communities together. We like to partner with organizations that are aligned with the practice of law and helping people. Many of you are already deeply entrenched in pro bono work in your states, and some of our IL friends might well be aware of the great work that Illinois Prison Project is doing. We look forward to lending our staff and our resources to lawyers doing the excellent work of bringing people together, helping them provide for their needs, and keeping communities strong.
If your firm would like to partner with IPP as well and see how you can plug in and help, you can email IPP’s Development Manager at shana@illinoisprisonproject.org.