The Open Philanthropy Project recommended a grant of $100,000 to ReFrame Mentorship (via the Center for Civic Policy) for general support. ReFrame Mentorship is an intensive training and mentorship program in strategic communications for social justice movement organizers. We recommended a previous grant to this organization and are continuing to support it because we have been impressed with its work in the past and think that it is well-positioned to build the strategic communication capacity and practice of key criminal justice reform organizations.
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.