Funders Are Backing a Push to Clear Criminal Records. For Many Involved, It’s Personal

Sheena Meade, managing director of the Clean Slate Initiative. Meade previously worked as a program officer at Galaxy gives.

Backed by some major funders, a partnership of advocacy organizations is tackling an issue that both costs the U.S. economy billions a year and causes huge hardships for roughly a third of Americans—employment discrimination against people with a former criminal conviction.

Last month, the Clean Slate Initiative announced the launch of campaigns in four new states to promote laws allowing people with past convictions for certain crimes to expunge, or “clean,” their public records after they’ve gone a number of years without committing a subsequent offense. Overall, the campaign is now active in 10 states, including three that are already in the process of implementing clean slate laws—Pennsylvania, Utah and Michigan.

The initiative was built out of work that began in 2018, when more than 25 partners from across the political spectrum joined together to advance clean slate campaigns across the country. While the group’s efforts were coordinated, there wasn’t a centralized funding pool at that time. The independent Clean Slate Initiative was formalized and funded in late 2019.

Today, the initiative is supported by funding from Arnold Ventures, the Ballmer Group, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Justice and Mobility Fund, a collaborative fund started by Blue Meridian Partners and the Ford Foundation. The coalition hopes to pass clean slate laws nationwide.

Sheena Meade, best known for her work restoring voting rights in Florida through 2018’s Amendment 4, is the initiative’s first managing director.

For several people involved in the effort, criminal record expungement is more than just a campaign—it’s a personal issue. Leaders working both within the initiative (including Meade) and for some of its funders have either dealt with past convictions themselves or have seen the harsh impacts of convictions on the lives of family members. 

A growing pool of funders

While CZI was instrumental in the launch of the national initiative, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation was an influential early funder of this push.

CZI first learned about the work through investments made by Kellogg, including for work behind passage of Pennsylvania’s first-in-the-nation clean slate law, said Ana Zamora, founder and executive director of the Justice Accelerator Fund, a CZI spinoff organization that is taking over the funder’s criminal justice work.

“We got involved around that time and started thinking about how to scale the work that had already begun in the wins that we saw in places like Pennsylvania,” Zamora said.

Jonathan Njus, Kellogg’s director of family economic security, told Inside Philanthropy that the foundation started working on clean slate efforts at the state level in 2017. That year, the foundation made a three-year, $2.4 million grant to the Center for American Progress to advance automatic record-sealing policy and occupational licensing reform in select states, build nationwide and bipartisan networks and coalitions, and support research and communications strategies.

“This was a collaborative effort with national and state organizations, including Community Legal Services, JustLeadershipUSA and the National Employment Law Project,” Njus said.

Kellogg made a two-year grant of more than $500,000 in May 2019 to Community Legal Services, Inc. in Pennsylvania to support its clean slate work in the state. From July 2020 through June 2022, Kellogg committed an additional $650,000 to the Clean Slate Initiative to support efforts in 10 states, the District of Columbia and nationwide.

Kellogg’s funding for such work comes from its Working Families program, which helps people find stable, high-quality jobs. To date, according to Njus, Kellogg has invested $4.2 million in clean slate efforts.

According to Zamora, CZI has given about $15 million to Clean Slate efforts nationwide, including direct grants to state organizations before the nationwide initiative was launched.

Arnold Ventures was one of a few national funders to get behind the initiative in 2020. For Arnold, “maximizing opportunity and minimizing injustice [is] at the heart of all of our policy reforms,” said Kevin Madden, executive vice president of advocacy. Arnold Ventures made a two-year, $3 million grant in support of the initiative, which is fiscally sponsored by the New Venture Fund.

“As an organization, we look at systems of inefficiency wherever they are and wherever they’re leading to inequality, and then that becomes a target of our reforms as a result. If you look at the criminal justice system, it’s very ripe for the type of reforms we hope to advance,” Madden explained. Arnold Ventures has been a major backer of criminal justice reform, having made over $300 million in grants toward the issue, according to its website.

Madden said that Arnold Ventures decided to get involved with clean slate efforts about a year and a half ago. “I think most folks who work in the criminal justice space recognized that this was a problem that really required some resources and some teamwork to tackle, given that there’s 50 different states with 50 different approaches to it, and some are doing better jobs at it than others,” he said.

The Justice and Mobility Fund is another funder that threw its weight behind the Clean Slate initiative last year, along with Arnold and the Ballmer Group.

“Ultimately, Clean Slate Initiative’s efforts to automate the clearing of past criminal records removes one of the largest barriers to upward economic mobility for millions of Americans,” said Mindy Tarlow, managing director at Blue Meridian Partners.

The Justice and Mobility Fund is a philanthropic collaboration co-founded by Blue Meridian and the Ford Foundation, with additional support from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies. The fund has dedicated $12 million over two years to the Clean Slate Initiative.

The stigma with an $87 billion price tag

The barrier to economic mobility from a past criminal conviction is high, deep and multi-faceted.

According to the Restoration of Rights Project, only 14 states provide expunging, sealing, or setting aside of the most expansive category of offenses, “broader felony and misdemeanor relief.” Twenty states mandate “limited felony and misdemeanor relief,” while the rest either don’t allow any expungement at all, along with the federal government, or limit it to misdemeanors and/or pardoned offenses.

All it takes is a quick look at the numbers to see how forcing people to carry a past conviction on their permanent records harms them, their families and the broader community. Across the United States, more than 44,000 restrictions, known as “indirect consequences,” hamper individuals with a past conviction. Those consequences can restrict returning citizens’ ability to get a driver’s license, to vote, to get particular jobs or housing—and often make them ineligible for public assistance to stave off hunger or homelessness.

The exact link between incarceration and future wages and employment is a bit fuzzy in the body of research to date. For example, in a 2018 review of research on the topic of collateral consequences overall, Professors David Kirk of the University of Oxford and Sara Wakefield from Rutgers conclude that “evidence is overwhelming that mass incarceration has produced significant social harms and that these harms are disproportionately visited upon the poor and disadvantaged,” but noted that the underlying processes aren’t well understood, and evidence is often inconsistent.

Despite some uncertainty in the data, recent reports about the effects of justice system contact on a person’s post-incarceration financial health paint a bleak picture.

In 2018, Brookings found that in the first full year after release, about 49% of formerly incarcerated people earned less than $500, 32% made between $500 and $15,000, and only 20% earned more than $15,000. In 2020, researchers from Indiana University and UC Berkeley’s Center for Law found that incarceration “significantly reduces access to credit,” including a 32-point drop in one’s credit score for each year spent behind bars. 

An Urban Institute study in 2017 found that 82% of companies were using criminal background checks as part of their hiring process, despite the significant flaws and inaccuracies found in many of the results. And the costs of a former conviction aren’t just borne by individuals and their families—society as a whole also pays a steep price. A 2016 report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research found our gross national product is reduced between $78 billion and $87 billion as a result of shutting formerly incarcerated job seekers out of the workforce.

Program staff have a personal stake

While the numbers alone are evidence enough that something has to be done, the leader of both the Clean Slate Initiative and people working for at least two of its anchor funders have either first- or second-hand experience with the need for change.

Aly Tamboura is one of those leaders. Tamboura, who was incarcerated for 10 years, served first for several years as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s criminal justice reform program manager. In February, the CZI spinoff organization, the Justice Accelerator Fund, announced that Tamboura would be its first strategic advisor.

“There’s very few program officers in philanthropy in the criminal justice space who are formerly incarcerated and I’m very proud that I get to work with one of them,” said the Justice Accelerator Fund’s Zamora, adding that hiring Tamboura was one of her first decisions after accepting her new position.

At Arnold Ventures, Carlton Miller, director of criminal justice, has a brother who has been incarcerated. Madden, Arnold Ventures’ executive vice president of advocacy, told Inside Philanthropy that Miller is one of many Arnold Ventures staffers whose families have been impacted by the criminal justice system.

As for the Clean Slate Initiative itself, founding Managing Director Sheena Meade has also seen the impact of past convictions on her loved ones. Meade, who helped restore voting rights to 1.4 million Floridians through her role as the director of strategic partnerships for the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, served as a criminal justice program officer at the Novogratz family’s Galaxy Gives immediately before coming on board to head up Clean Slate.

Meade told Inside Philanthropy that she’s “a little bit of a unicorn” because she brings to this work all the pieces of herself—as an organizer, a person with impacted family members, and someone with “insight on how the money moves within philanthropy.” This background, Meade said, has given her credibility with both the initiative’s funders and the local groups the national organization is looking to support with funding and in-person assistance with operations, including strategizing and communications.

Meade added that she’s grateful to head up an organization where she doesn’t have to focus on fundraising. “Just let’s get the plane flying, and let’s make sure that we’re supporting folks and winning and passing some bills.”