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.

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.

I said screw it. I'll build the thing myself.

It started as a simple event list. Just a page. Just the basics — what, when, where. I figured I'd update it once a week and that would be that. That lasted about three days before I realized how much stuff was out there. Park districts alone had hundreds of events. Libraries had story times, book clubs, craft nights, teen programs. Churches had fish fries, rummage sales, vacation bible schools. Schools had concerts, open houses, fundraisers. There were food truck rallies and farmers markets and 5K runs and charity dinners and car shows and festivals I'd lived here for years and never heard of.

So "a simple event list" became... this.

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.

This is 100% free. No ads. No paid placements. No premium tier. No sponsored content. No "featured listings" you can buy your way into. Every business gets the same treatment. Every event gets the same coverage. The Bourbs is a community resource, not a revenue stream.

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 newsletter, every editorial decision, every "Dale's Corner" — that's me. 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. We're building the plane while flying it, and honestly, that's half the fun.