The Open Philanthropy Project recommended a grant of $75,000 to the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition to support its work on prosecutorial reform. The Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition plans to use this grant to reach out to voters with criminal convictions, to provide public education on the powers and practices of prosecutors, and to work closely with a newly-elected district attorney on criminal justice reform.
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.