This Criminal Justice Reform Funder is Backing Those Impacted by the System to Lead the Way

Criminal justice reform is an area of philanthropy that has expanded dynamically during the past several years, attracting a wide range of donors funding several approaches. As Inside Philanthropy has reported, bail reform, policing reform and alternatives to incarceration are some of the notable strategies that have attracted a good deal of funder attention lately. There is another area, too, that’s important but flies somewhat under the radar: funding for leadership development among the formerly incarcerated, their families and others affected by mass incarceration.

Looking at decades past, the field of justice reform philanthropy has tended to center the ideas and solutions of attorneys and white professionals rather than people historically impacted and targeted by the legal system. But that has begun to shift as organizations that prioritize the strategies and perspectives of formerly incarcerated people and their loved ones—including the Formerly Incarcerated, Convicted Peoples and Families Movement, Essie Justice Group, and Voice of the Experienced—have received attention from national funders such as Ford Foundation, Open Philanthropy and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

One of the newer justice reform funders recognizing the value of constituent leadership is Galaxy Gives, the philanthropic vehicle of former hedge funder and now cryptocurrency investor Mike Novogratz and his spouse Sukey. Galaxy Gives formed in 2017, and criminal justice reform has been its biggest spending bucket. To date, it’s given $100 million in grants, with about half going to justice reform organizations, and the rest allocated to sports-based youth development, leadership, democracy, and healing.

As Inside Philanthropy has previously noted, Galaxy Gives has earned a reputation for betting on bold, successful justice reform projects such as The Bail Project, the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition and the REFORM Alliance. One of Galaxy’s own initiatives is the Galaxy Leaders Fellowship, which provides a one-time, unrestricted award of $150,000 to an annual cohort of 10 fellows. According to the program’s press release, 90% of fellows are previously incarcerated or had a close family member incarcerated, are crime survivors, or work within the system. The fellowship’s goal is to support “emerging leaders that are working to dismantle our nation’s reliance on incarceration and criminalization.”

This funding opportunity is now in its second year. The latest round of recipients was announced this week, and the application process for a third year is already in process. To date, the program has awarded $3.5 million to 20 fellows.

According to Alex Duran, program officer for criminal justice reform at Galaxy Gives, the selected Galaxy fellows are a “powerful cross-pollination” of emerging movement leaders who have had direct contact with the legal system in a variety of ways. Duran says that all too often, philanthropy has “privileged big think tank organizations that do good work, but they’re not putting their lives on the line, they have not been harmed by these systems as our leaders have. [The fellows] are dedicating their lives to dismantling the system. These are the folks who are most equipped to dismantle the carceral state.”

The Galaxy fellows work in a variety of capacities at organizations across the country, ranging from faith leaders to lawyers, advocates and writers. Fellows in the new cohort include Jacinta Gonzalez, an Arizona-based campaign organizer working on ending the criminalization of migrants, and Robert Holbrook, the executive director of the Abolitionist Law Center. According to the Galaxy Gives website, Holbrook spent “over two decades incarcerated for an offense for which he was convicted as a minor.”

Another Galaxy Leaders fellow, Jeannie Alexander, told Inside Philanthropy that she learned about the fellowship when Galaxy Gives reached out to her personally about the open application. This proactive approach to grantmaking is something that struck Alexander as different and refreshing. “It says something about the organization when the people working for it are plugged into what is happening on the ground, and aware of who is doing the work,” she said.

Alexander is a reverend and executive director of the No Exceptions Prison Collective, a prison abolitionist organization in Nashville that advocates for “un-caging our loved ones” through litigation, legislation and grassroots movement-building. Alexander’s initial time spent in the prison system was as a chaplain on death row, and during her years interacting with insiders, she began to grasp the fundamental value of understanding the system through personal experience. “Things can’t be theoretical; they have to be lived,” she says.

Alexander sees constituent leadership within justice reform as “not just important, but absolutely essential.” The Galaxy Fellows program, she says, supports a bottom-up approach that “acknowledges the people already doing the work who have been in the system, and helping them develop the tools to do work that is even more meaningful and more impactful.”

In that sense, the Galaxy Gives program is part of a larger trend we’re seeing in philanthropy right now, as funders pursue more responsive forms of giving that follow the lead of the communities they serve and people directly impacted by the problems they’re trying to solve.

Another strength of the Galaxy fellowship is the variety of programming and geographies represented by the current slate of recipients. This presents a unique opportunity for learning, information-sharing and strategic partnering. “It’s a benefit that we’re all approaching this from slightly different perspectives,” says Alexander. “If someone is focusing on voting rights, that’s great, because I can’t focus on reduction of [prison] sentences in the South and Tennessee if I’m focusing on voting rights. These things all intersect… and one of the benefits of the Galaxy program is we learn from each other.”

This post has been updated with more recent statistics on Galaxy Gives’ overall giving to date.

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