“It’s Going to be a Game-Changer.” A Closer Look at CZI’s Criminal Justice Spinoff

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In January, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) announced the launch of an independent spinoff organization dedicated entirely to criminal justice reform. The new organization, the Justice Accelerator Fund, will receive $350 million over the next five years.

The fund’s founding executive director, Ana Zamora, said the new organization will allow her team to “supercharge resources to the field” of criminal justice reform, “especially c4 resources.” Zamora, who previously worked as CZI’s director of criminal justice reform, is also a former criminal justice director for the ACLU of Northern California. 

Criminal justice reform activists interviewed for this piece were universally excited by the announcement of the new organization. While all of them have received large grants from CZI and have an incentive to be complimentary, the fact remains that the money CZI has given them has allowed each group to make solid progress and to center the voices and leadership of individuals who have been directly impacted by the criminal justice system. 

“I believe it’s going to be a game-changer,” said Robert Rooks, co-founder and former CEO of the Alliance for Safety and Justice, regarding the creation of the fund. Rooks is now the CEO of REFORM Alliance.

The potential impact of the Justice Accelerator Fund is particularly important, Rooks said, because criminal justice reform is “a relatively new field,” particularly when compared to advocacy around issues like the environment and education reform. 

“What I want people to understand about Justice Accelerator Fund is there’s a lot of scaling that needs to happen at the grassroots level.” Rooks believes that the Justice Accelerator Fund will play a key role in making that scaling possible.

For her part, Zamora said that the creation of the new fund will allow her team to “focus 100%... on criminal justice reform,” whereas CZI is a multi-issue funder. 

The Justice Accelerator Fund is in its initial stages, to the degree that its leaders are still in the process of deciding issues like whether or not the organization should be incorporated as a 501(c)(3), a (c)(4) or an LLC like CZI. But to Zamora, the overall direction, strategies and goals of the new project are clear. 

“This organization is committed to tackling racial and economic inequity and injustice head-on,” she said.

Impacted people take the lead

One way the fund plans to address those inequities is by supporting activists in directly impacted communities. “Our mandate,” she said, “is centering the voices of directly impacted people,” both in the grantmaking and “in our leadership and how decisions are made.” To that end, she said, her first decision was to hire Aly Tamboura, a formerly incarcerated person who previously served as CZI’s Criminal Justice Reform Manager. 

Nor is Tamboura the only system-impacted person in the new fund’s leadership. “I grew up with a direct family member who was justice-involved,” Zamora said, “and those experiences have had a deep and lasting impact on my life, including my life’s work.”

The fund is backing up Zamora’s words with dollars. CZI provides funds to the Quest for Democracy Fund of the Circle for Justice Innovations, a participatory grantmaking project with a steering committee of directly impacted people who then provide funding to directly impacted leaders and individuals throughout the U.S. 

“I love this portfolio because as a funder, I don’t choose who gets funding,” she said. “We are simply providing the funds, and then letting the decision be made by the people with lived experience.”

Bringing “unlikely allies” together in the face of well-funded opposition

The fund is also committed to building coalitions of “unlikely allies” to advance reform. “In order to transform our systems across the country, the reality is we have to work in red states and in blue states, and with people and communities who have different motivations and different reasons to come to the table,” Zamora said.

This is a strategy the fund will carry over from earlier work at CZI. Heather Rice-Minus, the director of government affairs for Prison Fellowship, first worked with CZI when her organization was part of a disparate coalition that successfully pushed to reinstate incarcerated people’s access to Pell Grants. Minus said that the coalition included her Christian faith-based organization, the Chamber of Commerce and law enforcement groups, and “I know a lot of different sectors were receiving grants from CZI” in support of that effort.

It’s also a necessary strategy, given the forces arrayed against reforming the system, many of which are also big spenders. In 2020 alone, just one player—private prison companies, which then housed 8% of incarcerated people—spent $3 million on federal candidates. Prison phone companies, which charge incarcerated people as much as $1 a minute, spent millions from 2011–2014 on a successful campaign to pass a federal law making it a crime for an incarcerated person to have a cell phone. On the local level, companies that provide healthcare in state and local prisons and jails invest heavily to promote their choices for sheriff.

Zamora stressed the importance of injecting new (c)(4) funding into the field. “Criminal justice reform is in part a political problem. And if we can’t address that problem with political solutions, then we are literally fighting with one hand tied behind our back.”

With that in mind, Zamora said she’d like to attract other funders to the Justice Accelerator Fund “who have the ability and the willingness to give big, and especially give in the 501(c)(4) space.” While CZI’s $350 million investment is “a historic amount of money,” Zamora said, it’s also “a drop in the bucket when it comes to the challenge that we have ahead of us to transform the criminal legal system.”

Under transition, the funding keeps moving

Funding for that transformation is continuing. Rather than asking grantees to wait while the Justice Accelerator gets its legal feet under it, CZI has continued to move money. 

Recently, Rice-Minus told me, she received a call from CZI during which she was told that they would like to give her Prison Fellowship’s general grant for next year ahead of time. “They’re calling it a bridge grant,” she said, adding that her program manager also asked her what else her group might need during the transition. The result was an additional grant—a planning grant for a program to train formerly incarcerated individuals who work in the Fellowship’s Justice Ambassadors program.

“I think that from its inception, the Justice Accelerator Fund was very intentional in making sure that lines of communication remain wide open” to his and other organizations led by impacted people, said Desmond Meade, the president and executive director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. The group first received support from CZI during its successful 2018 push to re-enfranchise Floridians with past felony convictions via Amendment 4. His wife, Sheena Meade, is the first managing director of the nationwide Clean Slate Initiative—another beneficiary of CZI’s funding.

A new organization, a fresh start

While the creation of the Justice Accelerator Fund seems to portend even more growth of an advocacy field that has seen rapid progress in the last few years, it’s also true that this new organization will have a welcome degree of separation from both CZI and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. As my colleagues Philip Rojc and Mike Scutari have documented, not everyone—including employees at CZI itself—gives the philanthropy high marks for its policies regarding equity in the workplace. Of course, Facebook has also  come under rising criticism in recent years—including from many progressive groups—for its role in amplifying misinformation and other practices.

Zuckerberg’s vast fortune, which currently stands at $111 billion, has made possible CZI’s big investments across a range of issues—with the promise of much more giving to come, since Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan are signatories of the Giving Pledge. But Zuckerberg’s day job also underscores the problematic tensions that can arise around billionaires and the philanthropies they build.

Regardless of where the money is coming from, though, the excitement surrounding CZI’s latest major move is real. Robert Rooks told me, “We saw the most diverse set of marches in this country’s history over the last year. People are listening, and we need to make sure that the groups on the ground that have helped create this moment are invested in. That’s exactly what Justice Accelerator Fund is going to allow to happen.”