Introductory Remarks at IDRA’s 2025 Annual General Meeting

(Remarks shared by IDRA Board President Stephen Goldmeier at IDRA’s Annual General meeting on November 6, 2025.)

The last few years have been a period of huge leaps forward for the Indigent Defense Research Association. They represented the first years of IDRA without its fearless founding leaders (Dr. Andrew Davies and Prof. Janet Moore) standing at the helm. But they also represented our first years as a non-profit entity with a board of (at this time) nine people co-leading all the new and exciting things we do. They represented our first years of conducting actual fundraising for our operations (and indeed our first years of needing funds for operation as we scaled up our technology and systems to match our growing community).

I’d be tempted to say these years have been challenging given both these large changes and the background radiation of the political situation in which we’ve all been working. But that would not be completely honest, because this board and this community have persisted through these changes and continued to be a resource to this community of practitioners dedicated to creating and sharing high quality empirical research in the field of public defense. Working with IDRA doesn’t feel difficult, even when the world around us does.

Since this is our annual general meeting, I thought it would be sensible to reflect on how IDRA has grown in various ways in the last year alone. 

We’ve added around 80 new members to our list since our last Annual General Meeting. With the help of everyone on the board (but especially Nicolas Sawyer) we moved IDRA’s website to a new hosting platform and made significant progress on our indigent defense research database, a tool for exploring a deep reserve of research our community has created and shared over time. We continued to hold our usual monthly meetings with diverse groups of practitioners and researchers, covering topics ranging from case-management systems for public defense data to tools for lawyers litigating forensic science to data-backed strategies for racial justice arguments.

We held our annual virtual conference and are about to have our set of IDRA panels at the American Society of Criminology’s annual conference, events that always ignite people’s work and even draw in non-members to our work and our discussions. 

Interestingly, the story of IDRA begins at the ASC conference, in 2014, which IDRA co-founder Janet Moore says was the event that spurred the creation of this group. This puts IDRA at about 11 years old. 

Having been involved with IDRA for about nine of those eleven years, I find it a bit dizzying to think about how we have grown and changed. We went from a group of two or three co-conveners and a few dozen committed researchers and practitioners (by my count 72 people in late 2016) to sometimes having over 72 people at some of our individual virtual events and a listserv of almost 500 people.

The numbers are not what matters, though. The real story of IDRA is how it has led to countless collaborations and innovations that have strengthened (or maybe even shaped) the field of data-driven research for indigent defense, research that has pushed many offices (and some whole jurisdictions) to improve how services are provided to the most vulnerable people in our country.

Thank you to everyone who joined for this meeting, and especially thank you to our current board, who meet every two weeks to keep IDRA the vibrant working space that it is: Claire, Leslie, Marea, Michael, Natalia, Nicolas, Torrin, and Venita.

It truly is an honor to be among this brilliant and dedicated community of practice as it changes and evolves. Thank you all for being a part of it and for being here today.