The Open Philanthropy Project recommended a grant of $200,000 to the Civil Rights Corps for general support. We are impressed with the work that Alec Karakatsanis, the Founder and Executive Director of the Civil Rights Corps, has done on bail reform, and we hope that our grant will enable him to do more work in this field. The Civil Rights Corps plans to use this grant to hire a senior litigator to supervise bail litigation.
This is a discretionary (formerly called “no-process”) grant. For discretionary grants, the grant investigator (in this case Chloe Cockburn, our Program Officer for Criminal Justice Reform) can recommend the grant without needing to go through our normal process of providing their reasoning, discussing with the team, and providing input on and review of our public page. These grants are limited to a relatively small proportion of our grantmaking, and some other stipulations apply to what types of grant are eligible. The overall aim is for us to be able to move forward on relatively small and low-risk grants, based purely on the judgment of a single staff member and with minimal delay.