Resources & Writing

Since 1970, mass incarceration has stolen generations’ worth of time from tens of millions of people, who are disproportionately poor, black, and brown. The harm inflicted on individuals, families, and communities is cyclical and constant, with roughly 10 million people taken from their homes and confined to a cell each year. American state, local, and federal governments spend $300 billion each year to maintain this, at an economic cost of over a trillion dollars. This destruction reinforces poverty and corrodes democracy. The expansion of this mass incarceration must be stopped and reversed, and the savings invested into building stable, safe communities.

I founded Just Impact in 2022, following 6 years of work at Open Philanthropy, with a goal of eliminating unnecessary incarceration and building alternatives for safe and healthy communities. Our supporters pool capital with us that we deploy to bring about the end of mass incarceration. Our goal is to safely reduce incarceration in the US by half within 10 years.

We are guided by principles of movement ecology and racial justice, and partner with the most trailblazing pioneers of criminal justice-focused philanthropy. We are agile fund managers looking beyond the present moment to the moral future in which our country’s criminalization and incarceration practices are unanimously rejected as undemocratic and inhumane. We believe that the way to create massive change is to build momentum.

We look for sparks created by strategically coordinated, talented people on the ground and we add support to achieve both individual wins and to open the way for efforts to activate others. We fund dynamic campaigns that feed off of each other and consistently spark new efforts, while growing the number of people who are committed to this work. We have funded the sharpest and most strategic leaders and organizations out there. The fund structure increases the collective impact of individual donors by pooling capital and deploying it strategically. We back up that funding with hands-on grantee support from our lean and skillful team. 

Warmly,
Chloe