CJI fund awards $1 million to address mass incarceration
December 26, 2021
The Circle for Justice Innovations in Brooklyn, New York, has announced that its Leadership Circle fund has awarded grants totaling $1 million to forty-eight grassroots organizations led by people directly impacted by mass incarceration.
CJI’s oldest fund, the Leadership Circle includes activists, donors, and donor-activists who work together to fund innovative and impactful organizations in the movement to end mass incarceration. To prioritize the perspectives of individuals who have been most directly impacted by the system they seek to transform, the fund also works to foster the leadership of those who have had the most contact with the system. Grantees include the American Indian Prison Project Working Group, Daughters Beyond Incarceration, Maine Youth Justice, Migrant Justice / Justicia Migrante, and the Urban Survivors Union. Twenty-two of the forty-eight recipients have been operating for no more than five years.
The latest round of Leadership Circle funding was made possible in part by co-investments from the Heising-Simons Foundation and the Jacob and Valeria Langeloth Foundation, along with a group of donors and activists who share a desire to transform the existing system. The $1 million total represents a 19 percent increase from 2020 and a record in CJI’s twenty-one-year history. CJI also awarded seven Strategic Opportunities Support (SOS) Rapid Response Circle grants this month, boosting its total grants distribution for the year to $2.035 million, awarded to 124 organizations in thirty states.
“When CJI started, we decidedly focused on funding organizations that were led by directly impacted people, because there was a dearth of organizations with that kind of leadership,” said CJI executive director Aleah Bacquie Vaughn. “We have so many great local organizations that we have to turn down. The story of hope and advancement in the movement is happening on the local level. That’s what’s important.”
(Photo credit: CJI Fund)
Source: PND
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