foiaday _{(noun; foi-a-day)}

1. The day that you file a batshit amount of Freedom of Information Act requests

2. The day those documents come back from the requests you’ve filed

The long and the short of it: I’m going to file a FOIA every day in 2026.

In 2023, I was talking with my then-coworker, Jewél Jackson, about personal projects I wanted to start. We were probably killing time between interviews with sources in the newsroom kitchen or grabbing some much-needed coffee down the block. 

I had been doing a lot of work with filing Freedom of Information Act requests in Illinois, especially the same requests to many different agencies. A big part of that was batch-sending requests, and I was hitting levels of FOIA I hadn’t before, sending hundreds or thousands at a time. So I thought: what if I consciously, deliberately did one every day, or every week? 

Jewél was very encouraging! (Thank you, Jewél!) But… I never did it. I got caught up with work and reporting and life and the year started and went. 

But it’s 1/1/2026. We all love making resolutions, and this feels like a good one. An attainable one. I’ve filed thousands of FOIA requests in my career so far. What’s another 365?

There’s no fun in doing it alone, though. Resolutions die without accountability. Why not broadcast it far and wide?

Here’s the sitch: I’ll be filing requests, and as I do, you’ll get emails. You’ll be able to see details of what I’ve requested, from whom or where, and I’ll update based on how long the agency took, any fun findings along the way, and lessons learned.

Don’t want to check your inbox? No worries. I’ll add some details of requests I’ve filed to a shared Google Calendar. If you subscribe to the calendar, you’ll get those requests integrated alongside your meetings and ever-intentionally-vague “busy” blocks.

I had done something like this in the month of December with the 31 Days of FOIA Advent Calendar. It was a great time, and I received a lot of feedback from folks who passed on messages or reached out directly that it wasn’t just a useful resource for them as means of inspiration, but that the links to sample language or document types was valuable, too.

Part of my goal for this project, this year, is to amass as many unique document types to request as possible. This isn’t a novel idea — there’s a great MuckRock session on 50 FOIAs in 50 minutes — but it is something that I feel inclined to chase down, especially to have in one place.

The other goal is to update my ever-growing list of FOIA contacts. In past work I’ve done, I had updated and built out a very large, very exhaustive list of contact info for FOIA officers around the state — thank you, Jared Rutecki, for laying the foundation. But over the past few years, I’ve gone back and forth with different agencies to net a larger list of FOIA officers around Illinois. My hope is to expand that more, clean it all up, and make it public for others to use. :-)

All of this also means you’ll get ideas for your own requests. Feel free to rip, pull or riff off mine. Yes, you have my blessing. (That’s kind of the whole point of this, anyway.)

FOIA shouldn’t be scary, or intimidating, or unapproachable. It’s gone through a veritable renaissance over the past two decades, with story after story after story born from an email sent to a records officer.

But for a lot of people, it is.

Folks have told me that they feel like they need to have the perfect request in order to file something, or that they need it to be big enough to make it worth sending. They’ve said that they feel out of their depth, or in over their head, or overwhelmed and not sure where to start.

So. If I’ve learned anything at all, what the advent calendar, running community FOIA workshops (including FOIAFriday with MuckRock!), teaching classes and talking to folks has shown me time and time again, year after year, is that the best way to dive in is to make it fun.

So let’s make it fun!

Cam