How Joyful Heart Foundation’s Three-Person Policy Team Tracks Every State and Territory

Joyful Heart Foundation’s three-person policy team follows hundreds of bills each year across all 50 states and the U.S. territories. With Quorum State, the team identifies rape kit reform bills early, tracks amendments and connects with the legislative staffers helping move them forward. In May 2026, the team achieved a milestone 16 years in the making with the passage of rape kit reform in Maine. Every state, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico now has at least one of Joyful Heart’s Six Pillars of Rape Kit Reform in law.

Before Quorum: 50 Legislatures, One Website at a Time

Ilse Knecht, Policy and Advocacy Director, has spent 25 years in victim advocacy and is a nationally recognized expert on the rape kit backlog. She learned state legislative tracking one website at a time. During 16 years at the National Center for Victims of Crime, where she created the DNA Resource Center, her team checked each state legislature’s website by hand.

“I would start at the beginning of the week at A and keep going,” she said. She read each state’s daily digest of new bills. If she was lucky, the website had a search bar. Some states barely had their legislatures online at all.

Gaps were common. A friend with LexisNexis access sometimes ran searches for her, but that help was hit or miss. When Ilse joined Joyful Heart in 2015, she made the decision on day one: “Okay, we’re getting a bill tracking system.”

The scope of the work has grown since. Today, the team follows rape kit reform, image-based abuse and statute of limitations reform, along with related developments such as a new option Texas created for survivors to report sexual assault. For three people, keeping up requires a consistent way to find relevant legislation and follow it through a session.

How the Team Runs a Legislative Session in Quorum

The busiest stretch comes at the start of a session, when new bills flood in. Lois Kim, Policy and Advocacy Coordinator, reviews the team’s email alerts, which deliberately cast a wide keyword net. She checks each match to determine whether it falls within Joyful Heart’s scope.

As bills begin moving, the team identifies its priorities for the session. Lois and Burcu Sagiroglu, Policy and Advocacy Manager, organize bills by issue area and write internal summaries, while Ilse oversees the tracking.

Hearing Details Without the Search

Quorum alerts identify the committee and hearing date. Lois said these often arrive before the hearing appears on the legislature’s own website. With a direct link available in Quorum, whoever sees the alert can add it to the team calendar.

“If you go to the legislature’s website and try to find the hearing link, it could be seven clicks away,” Ilse said. “It just saves us time having to go dig, dig, dig.”

One Workspace for Tracking and Coordination

Dashboards organize incoming bills by topic, giving the team a view of its work across states. Tracking boards and issue management keep priorities organized, and Outbox lets the team send letters of support.

That same tracking supports coordination with partners. Lois leads monthly calls with national partners on image-based abuse and shares a spreadsheet built from Quorum data. Joyful Heart’s public Six Pillars Legislation Tracker shows what the team tracks in Quorum, organized by its Six Pillars of Rape Kit Reform.

“They can’t change anything, but they can see what we’re seeing,” Ilse said.

Finding the People Behind the Bills

Legislative tracking also helps the team decide whom to contact. Staffer details rarely appear on legislative websites, but Quorum provides the information the team needs to reach the person helping shape a bill.

“Being able to really reach that person, I think, has changed things a lot,” Ilse said.

Past sessions offer another starting point. Before beginning work in a new state, Ilse reviews earlier bills and their sponsors. A name that appears repeatedly can point the team toward someone already invested in the issue.

“Going back to the list of bills from 2025 in California, I can see there’s only five bills to look at,” she said. “If I had to go to the website, it’d be ridiculous.”

AI Summaries Help With the First Review

Quorum’s AI summaries give Lois a starting point as she reviews incoming bills. She still reads every bill and writes her own summary, but the AI version helps her quickly recognize legislation that falls outside the organization’s scope.

That first pass is especially useful with omnibus bills, where a small provision can sit inside a much larger document.

“We get bills that are 1,700 pages long, but there’s four that have something about rape kits,” Ilse said.

The Maine Campaign: Closing the Last Gap

Maine was the last state without rape kit reform, and Joyful Heart spent five years there. The team worked with local advocates, the state crime lab and frontline experts. They testified, wrote op-eds and rallied grassroots supporters. They also hosted screenings of I Am Evidence, the documentary from Joyful Heart founder Mariska Hargitay.

Quorum kept the team on top of the legislation. In Maine’s 2025 session, Joyful Heart tracked two bills: one using language the organization had drafted and another introduced later by a Maine coalition. Both went to the same committee, and both were amended.

The team used Quorum to compare the bills side by side and review new versions after each hearing.

“It was helpful to use Quorum to see what was changed after each hearing and what was amended,” said Burcu Sagiroglu.

Previously, finding those differences required a manual, line-by-line review.

“They go through committees, and it can just be the smallest change, and it’s hard to catch,” Ilse said.

Hearing alerts helped the team stay ready for each committee step, while direct links made Maine’s hearings easier to access. Together, those tools helped the team follow both the legislative process and the language changing within it.

In May 2026, Joyful Heart’s bill was included in the governor’s state budget and became law. Maine was the final state to act. With its law, all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico had enacted at least one of the Six Pillars, a goal 16 years in the making.

The Results: National Coverage From a Small Team

For Ilse, the biggest change is confidence in what the team sees.

“I feel really confident that we’re seeing most of the legislation that’s being introduced out there on the topics that we are interested in,” she said.

That coverage also gives Joyful Heart data it can share publicly. The organization reports how many rape kit reform bills states introduce each year — a count Ilse says “would be really hard to do if we had to just go state by state.”

In 2025 and 2026 so far, the team monitored 73 rape kit reform bills across 29 states and Puerto Rico, and 28 were signed into law. Along the way, it delivered seven expert testimonies and 33 letters of support.

Joyful Heart reports that its work has helped pass 199 bills nationwide. Twenty-two states and Washington, D.C., have now adopted all six pillars, and the estimated national backlog has dropped from 300,000–400,000 untested kits to 51,436.

Where she once spent each week working alphabetically through state websites, her team now has a shared way to follow legislation, review amendments and find the people behind a bill across every state and territory.

Ilse put it plainly: “We’re such a small team that this tool allows us to do so much more than we would if we had to do it manually.”

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