CJI’s Leadership Circle is requesting proposals from formerly incarcerated people and directly impacted people-led grassroots organizations working to transform and reimagine the current U.S. criminal legal system, building to create new alternative community-based solutions and organizing to stop the criminalization of marginalized identities and communities.
Donor Name: Circle for Justice Innovations (CJI)
State: All States
County: All Counties
Type of Grant: Grant
Deadline: 06/21/2024
Size of the Grant: Not Available
Grant Duration: Grant Duration Not Mentioned
Details:
The Leadership Circle—CJI’s flagship fund—is an innovative grantmaking panel comprised of donors, donor-activists, and community organizers, most of whom have experienced incarceration themselves. They share authority through a common passion for supporting meaningful, transformative, and systemic change in the criminal legal system that develops and empowers future leaders.
This year, CJI will support movement-building organizing that is based in Creating the World –They Demand NOW! they want to support the efforts that:
- build alternatives to create safe and healthy communities that don’t rely on arrest and incarceration
- invest in approaches that seek to end mass criminalization and incarceration
- create policies to reform and dismantle current repressive criminal legal systems
- lift up the leadership and experience of those affected by the criminal legal system, regardless of the type of detention (e.g. jail, prison, ICE detention, etc)
- re-establish rights and access to those formerly incarcerated and newly criminalized; e.g. intersections of reproductive health & justice, protesting & resisting oppression and repression
- promote transformative and restorative justice that heals, builds across movements and collaborations to effectively address the current criminal legal system.
CJI Funding Preferences
- Organizations led by formerly incarcerated people on staff, board, and/or volunteer leadership capacity
- Groups that operate in difficult political environments, e.g. in the presence of hostile campaigns, antagonistic public figures, or repressive laws;
- Groups that develop new leaders, especially from people who are marginalized within their own community, e.g. formerly incarcerated people, poor people, houseless people, young people, elders, queer and trans people, people with mental illness, people with disabilities, etc.
- Work that addresses discrimination or abuse against people who have been incarcerated or detained, including discrimination in housing, employment, education, voting and parental rights;
- Work being done in the South, Indian country on reservations, rancheros, pueblos, missions, villages, etc. and other rural areas;
- Organizations with a membership base and an identifiable decision-making process for constituents/members/ or communities;
- Groups that engage in innovative collaborations, building alliances among organizations with diverse backgrounds and common interests. Strong collaborations may include groups with geographic and demographic diversity (such as race, class, income, immigration status, ability & disability, gender & gender identity, sexual orientation, and age), as well as varying experience with incarceration, or detention.
- CJI may fund organizations that provide culturally appropriate healing/inner transformational programs that are connected to the criminal justice movement. We believe that healing is important to develop leadership among those most impacted by the criminal legal system, and to disrupt the cycle of incarceration.
Eligibility Criteria
CJI will ONLY fund:
- Organizations with a demonstrated commitment to including the leadership of people who have been incarcerated (defined as confinement in prison, jail, immigrant, juvenile or military detention, or deportation facility), and/or others who have been directly impacted by the system, including primary family members of incarcerated people.
- Organizations committed to achieving systems change through organizing, including changes in policies or institutions, such as parole, probation or other systems of control or building community based interventions and disruptions to end mass criminalization and incarceration.
- Organizations with budgets of $1 million or less. They are committed to supporting the smaller, emerging organizations and give consideration to those with smaller budgets. If you are under the umbrella of a larger organization, please define your relationship with that organization.
- Previous grantees that have provided a CJI Progress Report with information about their most-recent CJI-funded work.
- Organizations that meet the application deadline with all their required attachments. To accommodate the increased number of proposals due to an open application process, CJI will hold applicants strictly to the application deadline.
For more information, visit CJI.
