The National Council was founded in 2010 by a group of women incarcerated in federal prison in Danbury, CT. Many of them mothers, The National Council is a coalition of system-impacted women pioneering several distinct initiatives to end the incarceration of women and girls. The National Council advocates for the unique needs of women entangled in the corrections system, who face harsher penalties for intimate partner violence, must overcome unique barriers as primary caretakers, and who make up the fastest growing segment of the incarcerated population. It does so by actively developing self-sufficient, community-led systems of accountability that don’t involve prisons or police, transforming possibilities for how we respond to harm at both the community and national level in the process.

The National Council is establishing the second annual Community Love Fund, first announced in 2021, with the assistance of the Fund for Guaranteed Income. The Council will expand the number of recipients to seventeen formerly incarcerated and four currently incarcerated women, with F4GI as its disbursement and implementation partner. Participants will be able to spend the money to meet their most pressing needs however they see fit—no strings attached. This program is the first of its kind to distribute direct, recurring cash relief to people currently behind bars. 

To alleviate the economic pressure price gouging exerts on incarcerated loved ones and their family members, The National Council will combat extortive penal practices with a guaranteed income. It will be the first organization to do so within prison walls. It will also combat economic precarity among formerly incarcerated women, who experience the detriment of a criminal record long after serving their sentences. Twenty one system-impacted women—four of them currently incarcerated in state and federal prisons in the United States—will be provided a guaranteed income of $500 a month for a year. As we fight to end incarceration in the long term, guaranteed income initiatives led and developed by system-impacted leadership are a pathway to transformative justice in the immediate term. The Community Love Fund will show us how an alternate, more expansive understanding of public safety can take root when we invest into caring for our communities, one woman at a time.