With More Donors on Board, Open Philanthropy Is Spinning Its Criminal Justice Work into a New Fund

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In the six years since Open Philanthropy’s criminal justice reform program began, it has become one of the most influential funders in this area of philanthropy, overseeing a wide-ranging grantmaking portfolio and supporting organizations working to end mass incarceration in the United States. The team has given or advised on hundreds of grants totaling more than $250 million since its launch in 2015. 

This week, Open Philanthropy announced the closure of this program and the corresponding launch of an independent organization—Just Impact Advisors—with $50 million in seed funding provided by Open Philanthropy, along with an initial $39 million commitment from five additional donors. With this promising start, Just Impact is ready to hit the ground running. 

The new fund will be led and managed by Chloe Cockburn, who led Open Philanthropy’s criminal justice reform focus area as its program officer. According to a press release, the organization will build on the program’s work, moving forward with existing partnerships and grant recipients while also bringing a “sharper focus to building the power of those creative leaders and activists who have been directly impacted by the criminal justice system.”

The organization pledges to commit 20% of its grantmaking to efforts led by impacted and formerly incarcerated people. This is in the tradition of Open Philanthropy’s existing program, which has given sizable grants to organizations led by the formerly incarcerated and their families, including the Essie Justice Group, Voice of the Experienced and the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls.

In a conversation with Inside Philanthropy about the new organization, Cockburn said that with this launch, there will no longer be a criminal justice focus at Open Philanthropy. “That’s going with us, and it’s in part because of their confidence and belief in our team. They decided to make this major contribution, which we’re clearly excited about.”

Big bets and first believers

According to Cockburn, Just Impact will operate similarly to the program that’s being phased out at Open Philanthropy. That’s a good thing, considering the program saw a lot of success under Cockburn’s leadership, largely due to her team’s ability to identify and fund smaller organizations capable of growing and creating impact. 

The art of identifying organizations with potential is something Open Philanthropy is known for. It was created in 2014 as a spinoff of Good Ventures, a foundation established in 2011 and largely funded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his spouse Cari Tuna. Good Ventures collaborated early on with GiveWell, an organization that evaluates charities, and that collaboration became Open Philanthropy. At its founding, the grantmaker promised to practice transparency, to embrace a research-based orientation, and to support giving areas that are often overlooked, yet have the potential to create large-scale societal change. 

GiveWell is a leading proponent of effective altruism, a rationalist, evidence-based approach to giving that seeks to maximize impact per dollar granted, often through global health giving. Open Philanthropy shares similar values and guiding principles, but its giving has evolved over the years in some interesting directions not typically associated with the EA movement. 

Today, Open Philanthropy’s core giving areas include Global Health and Development, U.S. Policy, Global Catastrophic Risks and Scientific Research. The Criminal Justice Reform focus was part of its larger U.S. Policy agenda, and it earned a reputation for making big, smart bets and partnering with organizations with strong leadership but limited funds. Cockburn describes this type of giving as being the “first believer”—the first philanthropic believer, that is—in an organization’s potential. 

“And it doesn’t always work,” Cockburn explains. “That’s the point of being a first believer. You have to be willing to take the plunge. But some of our groups have been wildly successful, and that’s a testament to the strength of our approach, if you have the expertise to pick who to back. I imagine it’s like being a scout in sports. You’re looking for the next great one.” 

Some of the factors that Cockburn’s team looks for include a strong board, leadership and staff, and credibility in the community. Organizations and funds that Open Philanthropy backed early and that proceeded to create impactful changes include Justice LA, the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, the Life Comes From It fund, Faith in Action, Voice of the Experienced, Essie Justice Group and the National Bail Fund Network. 

The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition and its leader Desmond Meade spearheaded the successful campaign to restore voting rights to formerly incarcerated citizens in Florida via ballot measure in 2018. Cockburn says that when they partnered with Meade in 2016 to create the coalition, she was “shocked” to discover that OP’s grant was the organization’s first. “I want to be clear—Desmond had been working on this for years,” Cockburn says. “We didn’t bring Desmond into the field. He was there. We gave him funding.”

The larger point is that many leaders within movements are on the precipice of doing something big. They simply lack the funding. In theory, one of the goals of philanthropy is to identify those organizations and fund them in a way that doesn’t interfere with the great work they’re already doing. But in practice, this is difficult because it’s risky. It involves providing general operating grants to small organizations and stepping back as they use that funding flexibly. 

This is the type of high-risk, high-reward grantmaking that many philanthropies aspire to, but don’t actually practice. In a 2020 article for Inside Philanthropy, Stuart Buck, the vice president of research at Arnold Ventures, singled out Open Philanthropy as a funder that really practices this type of giving, which is variably called innovation or venture philanthropy. “Venture capitalists are willing to see nine out of 10 investments fail if the 10th is an early investment in the next Apple or Google. The outsized returns in that 10th investment more than pay for the other failures,” Buck wrote.

Cockburn sees the process less as investments on risky bets, and more as supporting organizations that are bursting with potential yet are underfunded. “If someone’s budget is x, it’s hard for them to get to 2x or 3x,” she says. “They sort of inch along, and that leaves the organization stuck at a certain level, when that level is actually two sizes too small from what they should be.”

An example is Voice of the Experienced, an organization in New Orleans that works for employment, housing, medical and voting rights for the formerly incarcerated, as well as the rights of crime survivors. In 2016, Open Philanthropy provided a grant that was substantially more than the organization’s operating budget at the time—another practice grantmakers have traditionally shied away from, thereby limiting the funding small organizations can receive. 

“They’ve been off to the races ever since,” Cockburn says, with major legislative, policy and political wins in New Orleans. The reason the funding created such immediate impact, she argues, is because the potential was already there. “The organization has grown to its more natural size.” 

Funding directly impacted and formerly incarcerated movement leaders

Just Impact plans to continue this strategy of identifying big bets with big payoffs, while also seeking productive partnerships with other justice reform funders, engaging with the donor community and continuing to support work that has proven successful or is overlooked by other funders. 

Part of the rationale behind the separation from Open Philanthropy is the hope that a standalone entity committed solely to criminal justice reform will attract attention from new donors. To date, the fund has received commitments from five donors, including Sarah Barton, the spouse of Zillow and Glassdoor co-founder Rich Barton, and tech entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan, who is married to Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Just Impact also received a $30 million gift from a donor who asked to be anonymous. 

Similarly to the criminal justice program at Open Philanthropy, Just Impact will support a range of causes and strategies within justice reform, so long as the work aligns with the fund’s larger goal of decarceration and “backing alternative systems for addressing harm and making safe and healthy communities.” This might include bail and pretrial reforms, supporting research and advocacy work, funding restorative justice pilot programs, reintegration programs, narrative change work and more. There are certain areas, though, where the fund plans to focus particular attention.

Foremost among these is backing organizations and movements led by directly impacted people and their families, and leaders who are incubating training and leadership development programs. 

“We know the leadership of the directly impacted is critical for a movement to succeed,” Cockburn says. While many leaders have emerged in recent years, the field needs a lot more, and across more states and locales. “We have seen incredible examples of what can happen when we resource this field, yet we are a long cry away from ending mass incarceration. This is an entrenched set of systems. This is going to take a lot of sustained work in a lot of places.”

Other areas of interest include supporting the leadership of formerly incarcerated women, as well as supporting those who work with children of incarcerated people. The organization will not shy away from funding 501(c)(4) work, which Cockburn says is essential for social justice movements in the U.S., where policy is shaped by politics. She cites the successful passage of ballot measure R in Los Angeles, which strengthened oversight of the sheriff’s department and supported alternatives to incarceration programs and support services for people in jails and prisons. 

“When these organizations showed up with substantial c4 funding, that really shifted how people in L.A. treated them,” Cockburn says. “They were taken seriously as a political threat.”

Across the issues with which Just Impact will engage, the approach combines flexibility and ceding power to grantees with the clarity of research and forethought. “We are not overly determining what is happening, which is something dangerous [in philanthropy], where you’re pushing people in a direction they don’t want to go,” Cockburn says. “But you also don’t want to have no idea what you’re doing. We have jumped on things that aren’t in people’s strategy documents, but where there is a spark that can become a powerful source of heat and momentum for the work.”