Meeting Date: July 30th, 2021
Meeting Time: 10 am to 12:45 pm Cental Standard Time
Location: 300 W. Adams, Suite 200, Chicago, IL (ICJIA/SPAC Office) and virtually on Zoom. Please see meeting materials for information about how to virtually attending the meeting.
June 18th UPDATE: Governor Pritzker recognized the importance of commemorating Juneteenth (June 19th) by signing HB 3922, which designated it as a State holiday. Juneteenth is the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the ending of slavery in the United States. Juneteenth, short for June 19th - highlights the day in 1865 when news of the Emancipation Proclamation finally reached what was believed, the last enslaved Black Americans in Galveston Texas. This was more than two years after the January 1, 1863 order that granted freedom to all slaves.
Like Governor Pritzker, President Biden signed a bill today with an immediate effective date designating Juneteenth as a federal holiday. Therefore, Governor Pritzker is pleased to join with the Federal government in closing State offices on Friday, June 18, 2021, in observance of the Federal Juneteenth holiday. Consistent with this decision, the SPAC meeting scheduled for June 18th has been cancelled. The meeting will be rescheduled and details for time and location will be published on the website as soon as they are available.
The June, 2021 SPAC meeting will focus on how to view the issues around equity in relation to research, and what SPAC should be thinking about in terms of understanding those issues. The thought-provoking report, Why Am I Being Researched, is part of your materials because it gives a view into how research is perceived by those who are researched and the ways in which it fails to serve the people it targets. Page seven of the report gives a summary of the systemic inequities the researchers at Chicago Beyond identified which will help focus our discussion. The end of the report includes how funders can be more aware of addressing these issues.
SPAC is funded by the citizens of this state and we have unique access to criminal justice data and extremely valuable collaborations with system actors. Does our work serve the interests of our citizens as well as it should? Have we had any impact in terms of research and analysis informing policymaking? This meeting will be the beginning of a discussion of how we can identify some goals for SPAC in addressing the equity issues that are inherently present when every data point represents a person.