About & FAQ

The short version: I'm the guy who couldn't stop complaining, so I built something instead.

I live here. Not "used to live here." Not "have family from here." I live here. Kankakee County, Illinois. The place where people ask "where's that?" and you say "south of Chicago" and they nod like they know, but they don't know. That's fine. We know.

I'm the person who writes Dale's Daily — the morning newsletter that hits your inbox at 6 AM with everything happening across the county that day. Events, local news, restaurant reviews, school highlights, the occasional rant about why nobody updates their website. I've been told I care too much about community calendars. I take that as a compliment.

I'm not a journalist. I'm not a politician. I'm not trying to sell you anything. I'm a guy who got annoyed that there was no single place to find out what's happening in his own county — so I built one. Then I kept building. And I haven't stopped.

Some people collect stamps. I collect event listings from park district PDFs. We all have our thing.

Dale doesn't write all of it. Meet the rest of the desk.

Three bylines run The Bourbs. Each one covers a different corner of the county, and each one sounds like a different person, because they are meant to.

Because somebody had to put all this stuff in one place.

Here's what it was like before The Bourbs: You wanted to know what's happening this weekend in Kankakee County. Cool. Good luck. First, you'd check the Bourbonnais Township Park District website. Then the Kankakee Valley Park District site. Then the Limestone Library calendar. Then the Bourbonnais Library calendar. Then the Kankakee Library page. Then three different Facebook groups. Then someone's cousin's post from six days ago about a pancake breakfast that may or may not still be happening.

By the time you'd finished your research, the weekend was over.

The problem wasn't that nothing was happening. The problem was that everything was happening — and nobody could find any of it. Events were scattered across 50+ Facebook groups, a dozen park district websites, library calendars that hadn't been updated since the Clinton administration, church bulletins you could only get on Sunday morning, and word-of-mouth that only worked if you happened to know the right people.

So somebody built the thing. It started as a list one dad kept for his own family, and it got away from him.

Way more than you'd expect from a free website, honestly.

The Bourbs is a full community platform for Kankakee County. That sounds corporate and I hate it, but it's accurate. Here's what we actually maintain, every single day:

The Daily Newsletter. Every morning at 6 AM, Dale's Daily lands in your inbox. Today's events, local news, a restaurant review, school and community highlights, and Dale's Corner — where I ramble about local history, things I've noticed, or whatever's on my mind. It's like having a neighbor who actually reads everything and tells you the good parts.

Event Maps & Calendars. Every event in the county — plotted on a map, organized in a calendar, searchable by town. We pull from park districts, libraries, Facebook groups, community organizations, school districts, churches, and public submissions. If it's happening in Kankakee County, it's on here.

Local Directories. Restaurants, services, parks, entertainment, gyms, schools, churches, daycares, food trucks, pet services — all mapped, all free, all maintained by actual humans who live here. No paid placements. No ads. If you exist and you're in Kankakee County, you get listed.

Local News. We scrape 25+ news sources daily and curate the most relevant stories for the county. No clickbait. No national noise. Just what actually matters to the people who live here.

Free Websites. Yeah, we also build free websites for local businesses that don't have one. Because if your amazing tamale lady doesn't show up on Google, that's a problem I can fix.

The homepage Kankakee County never had.

I want The Bourbs to be the first place you check when you want to know what's happening. Before Facebook. Before Google. Before asking your coworker who always seems to know about the fish fry three towns over.

I want the person who just moved to Bourbonnais to be able to open one website and feel like they know the place. Where to eat. Where to take the kids. What's happening this Saturday. Who to call when their furnace dies in January. All of it. One place.

I want every small business in this county to have a presence online, even if they can't afford a web developer. I want every church rummage sale and library story time and park district craft night to be findable by someone who would actually show up if they knew about it.

I want this county to see itself the way I see it: a place where a ridiculous amount of good stuff is happening, all the time, put together by people who care.

We're not Chicago. We're not trying to be. We're 27 small towns full of people who coach Little League and run pancake breakfasts and organize toy drives and keep the same restaurant open for 30 years because the community keeps showing up. That's worth documenting. That's worth celebrating. That's worth one guy staying up too late making sure the Saturday events are accurate.

Some things you should probably know.

Nobody pays us and nobody buys their way on. No ads, no paid placements, no premium tier, no sponsored content. Every business gets the same treatment, every event gets the same coverage, and we stay out of politics entirely. Those promises are written out in full — along with the money trail and our corrections policy — on the Transparency page.

We don't track you. No accounts. No cookies following you around the internet. No data collection. No analytics creepiness. You show up, you find what you need, you leave. That's how the internet was supposed to work.

Dale's got an AI sidekick. Full disclosure — there's some serious automation and AI helping pull this together. Scraping 40+ websites daily, processing hundreds of events, writing newsletter drafts at 4 AM — one human can't do all that alone without either going insane or producing garbage. So I built systems to help. But every editorial decision — what runs, what doesn't, what gets called out — is a human call. The robots handle the grunt work. The heart is human.

We make mistakes. Sometimes an event gets the wrong date. Sometimes a restaurant listing has old hours. Sometimes the map puts something in the wrong spot. We fix things fast when we find them, and even faster when you tell us. If you ever think we've been unfair or slanted, say so — how we handle that is spelled out, and admitting we blew it costs us nothing but pride.