Fundraisers for Criminal Justice Reform Forge Ahead After An Unprecedented 2020

Beginning in the spring of 2020, criminal justice reform organizations experienced fundraising surges on a scale that few could have predicted. In Minnesota, where George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer, the Minnesota Freedom Fund—a once-tiny bail fund—received more than $30 million in contributions after Floyd’s death. The Movement for Black Lives, which raised $2.7 million in 2019, raised $90 million in 2020. And in the 2020 fiscal year, the Bail Project brought in $41 million from an astonishing 468,000 donors, as compared to $14.9 million from 5,100 donors in 2019.

This was, in large part, the result of two major developments: the COVID-19 pandemic and surging donor interest in racial justice issues. The COVID outbreaks in prisons and jails drew attention to the material health and sanitation conditions within the system, while the release of inmates to combat the virus cast a spotlight on programs and services for the formerly incarcerated, such as reintegration programs. At the same time, a series of police killings sparked interest amid institutional, corporate and individual donors in policing reform, alternatives to policing, defunding police departments, restorative justice and pretrial reform.

The protests themselves drew attention to the machinations of the justice system, as people witnessed police violence as well as protestor arrests and detentions. Bail funds and pretrial reform organizations, in particular, found themselves at the nexus of these events, but organizations working across criminal justice reform issue areas experienced increased giving—in some cases, small but notable bumps; in others, game-changing opportunities. Fundraisers we spoke with reported greater interest from a wider range of funders; more flexibility in grantmaking from institutional funders and a stronger understanding of underlying, systemic problems and the importance of community-led organizing. Now, these organizations hope to turn this surge in interest into lasting change, building on years of dedicated work on these issues.

“I really do believe that we have shifted, and I think the proof is that we are out doing the work, and it is funded by a wide variety of funders,” says Jessica Stadt, chief of philanthropic engagement at Youth Advocate Programs (YAP), a national nonprofit working in youth justice, violence interruption and community-based alternatives. “Real change is happening, and the criminal justice sector has waited a long time for change to come.”

Increased funding is coming from many sources

The twin influences of COVID-19 and the racial justice uprising seemed to have different fundraising impacts, depending on an organization’s size and existing funding sources. YAP is a longstanding youth justice organization founded in Pennsylvania in 1975 with a program to keep juveniles out of a state prison. Today, it operates in 31 states and Washington, D.C., and receives the majority of its funding from government contracts. In 2020, 91% of YAP’s approximately $78 million in revenue came from government contracts, and 9% from private contributions.

According to Carla Powell, chief of advancement and development at YAP, private contributions have become a more important source of funding—so much so that YAP hired Stadt to oversee philanthropic engagement in early 2020. “Government funders can only pay for so much, and there are so many needs in the communities we serve,” Powell says. Stadt came on board just months before the pandemic, and the racial justice protests further accelerated the importance of philanthropic engagement. Funders have become more interested in larger questions about public safety and alternatives to detention, and new players are stepping forward. Powell has noticed that on foundation websites, the language itself is changing, with explicit acknowledgment of the racial disparities that affect communities.

“When we started putting out more marketing on our website about our violence interruption program, we had more funders actually coming to us,” says Stadt. “We’re seeing these collaboratives of people coming together in their own communities, and saying, ‘We want solutions.’ And the funders are responding. Carla and I sit in on meetings with communities where community representatives are there, as well as foundations and corporations, and we have been seeing a lot of people working together.”

New public-private partnerships are emerging, and corporations are interested in working with YAP on workforce development. In Chicago, YAP collaborates with the University of Chicago Crime Lab and Children’s Home & Aid on the Choose to Change (C2C) program, which provides services to youth impacted by violence and the justice system. The program has attracted recent funding from private funders like the MacArthur Foundation and the Pritzker Pucker Family Foundation, from corporations like AbbVie, from the mayor’s office and the Chicago Public Schools, from an alliance of Chicago’s professional sports teams and from individual donors. These layered supports are an example of the growing importance of justice reform to funders of many types.

Funding is becoming more flexible

Impact Justice, a national justice reform and research organization founded in 2015, has likewise seen new funding opportunities emerge. According to Erica Lawson, associate director of development at Impact Justice, the most notable change in 2020 was an increase in contributions from individuals.

“Proportionally, we did see a lot more activity with individual donors,” says Lawson. “With everything coming together this last year—with racial justice, and conditions with COVID, with all of that—there is a growing need and interest for justice reform, and we definitely saw that pool of donors grow.”

There were also shifts in the organization’s relationship with its existing institutional funders. “There has been a willingness to be more flexible with funding, more flexible with what we need in the moment, and how to direct funds,” Lawson says.

Similar to YAP, Impact Justice receives the majority of its funding, 69%, from government contracts. But private support, particularly from foundations, is still central to the fundraising strategy, with each of the organization’s programs pulling funds from a different mix of sources. The PREA Resource Center, which works with local agencies to advance sexual safety in prisons and jails, is funded by a cooperative agreement with the Department of Justice. Other Impact Justice programs rely more heavily on private support, including the Restorative Justice Project, the COVID-19 Emergency Response Fund, and the Homecoming Project, which helps provide affordable housing to people returning from prison in two California counties.

Alex Busansky, president and founder of Impact Justice, says that funders increasingly understand systemic racism and see justice reform issues through a new lens. “Some of our funders began to realize that what they do, even if they aren’t in the criminal justice space, relates to criminal justice. So philanthropy itself is looking at how these issues like housing, education, food—this all is about criminal justice.... There is a real intentionality around it now, and a much broader, holistic approach.”

From a fundraising perspective, this means that Impact Justice is increasingly approaching funders who aren’t typically active in the criminal justice reform space. Lawson and Busansky say that funders have also become more interested in supporting BIPOC-led and constituent-led organizations, and are recognizing the impact of small community organizations.

Patrice Sulton, founder and executive director of the DC Justice Lab in Washington, D.C., certainly has insight into increased funder focus on smaller organizations. Sulton launched DC Justice in 2020 after receiving a $200,000, two-year grant from the Public Welfare Foundation, followed by an unrestricted $500,000 grant from FWD.us, a political organization funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Sulton incorporated DC Justice as a nonprofit in 2019 and hadn’t planned to launch until 2021—but plans changed, and she launched in 2020 instead.

“Foundations were open to picking [justice] reform proposals at that time,” Sulton says. “Before George Floyd’s death, people were moving away from police reform and juvenile justice work. After George Floyd’s death, there was a surge of interest in working on policing and racial justice.” Sulton also received encouragement from a key board member, as well as her law students, who would be involved with DC’s programming. It was also a “sense of self-efficacy,” Sulton says, that moved her forward.

“George Floyd’s death affected me in a deeply personal way,” she says. “It took a watershed moment in American history for me to believe that enough people were ready for the change I wanted to see. It was always obvious that the work was needed, but it wasn’t always obvious to me that it was possible.”

DC Justice Lab is focused on researching, organizing and advocating for “large-scale changes to the district’s criminal legal system.” Its first initiative was the More Than a Plaza campaign, which advocates for changes to policing in D.C. Other projects include work on D.C.’s Police Reform Commission, the Seal the Deal campaign in support of criminal record expungement, and the Unlock the Box campaign to end solitary confinement. Sulton emphasizes that DC’s strategy is to tackle the entire system and advocate for lasting legal changes rather than a projects-based approach—and increasingly, funders understand that a systemic approach requires unrestricted, multi-year grants.

For now, Sulton’s fundraising focus is foundation grants, but she hopes to diversify by approaching giving circles and corporations, which are more of a strategic challenge. “Last year was interesting because every large company had a statement about racial justice, and I felt like, how do I tap into that? Each business partnership feels like a new relationship to forge, a new thing to learn. It’s more opaque.”

Coalitions and movement building remain important

Sulton has also noticed that foundations, in particular, seem interested in funding coalitions, which has prompted her to think about future opportunities for DC Justice’s partnerships.

The Essie Justice Group is a California-based organization that takes part in multiple justice-focused coalitions, including the Movement for Black Lives and the National Bail Out. Gina Clayton-Johnson, Essie’s founder and executive director, has likewise noted increasing funder focus on coalitions and movement building.

“I commend the [philanthropic] organizations that made sure they moved in the direction of coalitions that needed the resources,” she says. According to Clayton-Johnson, the strategic capabilities of these coalitions derive from the impactful community work of member organizations. This work enabled the coalitions to be so powerful in 2020 and beyond. “We’re in an important movement moment that has been built over many years by organizing in communities, by refining political demands, by chipping away in local campaigns toward reforms that we’re now talking about in more mainstream spaces.”

The Essie Justice Group is an organization of women with incarcerated loved ones, working in bail reform, gender justice and running a Healing to Advocacy program that builds leadership among women who are “enduring a loved one’s incarceration.” The majority of Essie’s funding comes from foundations, including Open Philanthropy (its primary funders are Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz), the Meadow Fund (via the Silicon Valley Community Foundation), Google Play via Tides Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, and the California Wellness Foundation.

Essie did not see fundamental, sweeping funding changes in 2020, though there were upticks in contributions from individuals, as well as an unexpected $100,000 increase in an existing 2020 grant from Borealis Philanthropy’s Black-Led Movement Fund. The Black Mama Bail Out—a coalition that Essie is involved with—was also unusually successful in 2020, raising about $80,000 from individual donors between April and June 2020, as compared to about $18,000 so far during that same period in 2021. In general, Essie’s funding comes from longtime justice-funding foundations with whom Essie has an established relationship. “We were able to rest in the stability of that [in 2020],” Clayton-Johnson says.

Clayton-Johnson says that philanthropy’s growing openness to general operating support grants and an increasingly systems-based understanding of justice reform has allowed Essie to be more nimble in its response to the current moment, including needs that arise due to COVID. In the past, she says, a policy funder wouldn’t necessarily be interested in prison conditions work, like efforts to get sanitary equipment into prisons. But funders are now seeing the connections between folks’ experiences in jails and prisons and larger systems-oriented goals like changing prison policy at the state level.

“So I think now funders are saying, yeah, if that’s what you feel makes sense in terms of a tactic that leads to systemic change, then go for it,” she says. There has also been a “welcome change” with the grant process itself—applications are simpler, and funders are reaching out for feedback about their process. Funders also seem interested in the internal workings at Essie, “particularly with how our staff are treated, and not in a Big Brother, micro-management way, but in a supportive way.”

Like other justice reform fundraisers, Clayton-Johnson has observed growing funder interest in constituent-led organizing, in community organizing, and in theories of change that prioritize people from impacted communities and forging strategic partnerships with these communities. “I’m optimistic that this is a lasting strategic shift,” she says. “Many of our philanthropic partners believe in the strategy, and they’re doing a lot to bring others with them.”

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