HOW TO START A BAIL FUND
Abby Henry Jordyn Habib May 29, 2020 was a day that changed my life forever. It started off as an ordinary day until I got a text from (my now girlfriend) Curstynn. She texted me about a protest to demand justice for George Floyd in our hometown of Canton, Ohio. We had both moved home in March when our colleges closed at the beginning of the Coronavirus Pandemic. I was a bit hesitant to go because my family and I were quarantining very strictly, but I decided to leave the house and went with Curstynn to the protest. The protest lasted four hours and there were around 500 people present from our small city. We marched miles around the city and when the sky turned dark, the police started deploying chemical weapons and rubber bullets against us. Thirteen people were arrested, and Curstynn and I witnessed and recorded one of the leaders of the protest being pushed to the ground and escorted by five SWAT Team members to the police station. We tweeted the video to show our community what had happened in their city and the response was overwhelming. The
tweet went viral with tons of people asking us where they could donate bail money and how they could help. I scoured the internet to try and find a bail fund in our area, but the nearest one was in Cleveland, which is an hour away. Not knowing where else to turn, Curstynn and I decided to start our own bail fund. We ended up raising $20,000 in just 2 weeks. Bail funds are one way that communities can re-distribute money and resources to help their neighbors. Another example of a popular community aid initiative is an abortion fund. These types of initiatives help give folks in need access to the rights they should be entitled to. In the case of the bail fund, it gives people the ability to pay their bail despite their financial situation. Every community, no matter how big or small, could benefit from a bail fund because there are always people being arrested and having to pay exorbitant amounts of money to become free. But bail funds aren’t easy to start or to make successful, so here are some tips. First, you need to do some research and measure your community’s need for a bail fund. Figure out if any bail funds already exist in your city or town. You don’t want to start a competing bail fund because the
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