Alliance for Safety and Justice — General Support (December 2019)

Grant investigator: Chloe Cockburn

This page was reviewed but not written by the grant investigator. Alliance for Safety and Justice staff also reviewed this page prior to publication.

Open Philanthropy recommended two grants totaling $10,000,000 over three years to the Alliance for Safety and Justice (ASJ), via the Tides Center, for general support of its state-level criminal justice reform advocacy. ASJ is a national organization seeking to reduce overreliance on incarceration in states across the U.S. and to promote new safety priorities rooted in community health and well-being.

This grant falls within our work on criminal justice reform, follows our February 2016, April 2017, and November 2018 support, and will be our last grant to ASJ. We are providing a three-year runway of stepped-down funding to ensure that ASJ has time to recruit other major donors. At the end of this three-year runway, we will have funded ASJ for seven years. In that time, the organization has grown substantially in exciting ways, and has established a strong reputation for effective leadership and impactful policy reform work. At this stage, our criminal justice reform team thinks ASJ is a better fit for funders that are looking to support major, well-established institutions. Consistent with our thinking on hits-based giving, we want to ensure that our funding is tracking the emerging edge of the field, and that we are leaving room for funders to resource the lower-risk, more established organizations.

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