Cypher and the Bail Project

I was not in the best head space yesterday and to be honest I still am not. I don’t think anyone really is right now, but that is okay. Right now I have all sorts of minor issues going on, including the hard drive that I keep a lot of stuff on attempting to die on me. However I decided to make a post this morning because I saw something that actually helped me out a bit.

I am not even sure at what point I tuned in to the stream of @CypherofTyr but I do know that the original intent of the stream was to raise $500 for The Bail Project. When I joined the stream was somewhere between $10k raised and $20k raised, and throughout the afternoon I kept returning from meetings to watch the numbers just keep jumping. This became my afternoon activity of tuning in periodically to see where the stream was at. As afternoon turned into evening, things just started snowballing and over the course of a marathon 10.5 hour long stream she raised $142,781 dollars for The Bail Project.

It didn’t stop there however, as the fuse on Urban Bohemian’s stream was lit with the flamethrower that was everyone piling in after Cypher’s stream concluded. I had popped over ahead of the official end of the stream and was entertained as we watched the numbers start ticking upwards again. I admit that I didn’t stick around until the very end, but I stayed for a few hours and watched the numbers climb past $10k which triggered the inclusion of an amazing Unicorn Kigurumi. All total this stream raised an additional $15,305 for The Bail Project.

It kept going from there with SushieMonster, but by that point I had long been claimed by sleep. I didn’t get to sleep on Monday night until somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 am, and was back up at 5:30 am so I was running on fumes at this point. This third stream however continued again to raise another $6000.69 for The Bail Project. I think the coolest part about all of it, is that it introduced me to Tiltify, which I apparently was completely in the dark about. It seems to make it very easy for you to rally a team of streaming fundraisers around a specific cause, which is something that I will file away in my brain for possible future usage.

The best part however was to watch this one stream team raise a total of $184,654.59 for The Bail Project. This is still going however as there are a number of additional streamers signed up at part of the team and throughout the course of this article I have been linking to the Tiltify Team page which you can still donate on. You might find yourself asking “What is The Bail Project”, because to be honest it is not an organization I had heard of prior to yesterday. I think it is summed up succinctly with their mission statement.

We believe that paying bail for someone in need is an act of resistance against a system that criminalizes race and poverty and an act of solidarity with local communities and movements for decarceration. Over the next five years, The Bail Project will open dozens of sites in high-need jurisdictions with the goal of paying bail for tens of thousands of low-income Americans, all while collecting stories and data that prove money bail is not necessary to ensure people return to court. We won’t stop until meaningful change is achieved and the presumption of innocence is no longer for sale.

I’ve been around the criminal justice system enough to know that those individuals who are incapable of bonding out, don’t have great outcomes. They are robbed of the critical time needed to prepare their case, and god forbid if things don’t go well, get their affairs in order. If someone cannot bond out, they are greatly limited in the amount of time and types of interactions that they can have with not only legal counsel but their own family. It is a broad cause, but one that helps individuals from getting stuck in a system that is so insurmountably stacked against them.

As I said before I have been dropping links to Cypher’s Nat 20s stream team on Tiltify throughout this post. I highly suggest that not only do you tune in to some of the streamers participating, but that if you are in a place where you can do it you donate some money to this excellent cause.

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