Building a New Vision for Justice and Public Safety

Today, we are pleased to share more with you about the Justice and Mobility Fund, a philanthropic collaboration investing $250 million in boosting economic mobility and improving the life trajectories of people impacted by the criminal justice system. We are proud to co-sponsor this important initiative, along with Blue Meridian Partners and the Ford Foundation.

For decades, the United States has built a criminal legal system that legislates and criminalizes under the assumption that police, incarceration and punishment help to keep American communities safe. These models have not only failed to keep us safe, but they have and will continue to cause active harm, particularly within Black and brown communities.

Our Criminal Justice portfolio seeks to build healthy and safe communities by ending mass criminalization and incarceration, repairing the harm caused by a criminal legal system built on structural racism, and creating new pathways to justice and safety. Our work with the Justice and Mobility Fund is a step toward repair.

The Justice and Mobility Fund brings significant new resources to the field, including flexible capital and support for organizations’ planning and capacity-building efforts. The Fund has already invested $145 million in efforts to partner with innovative leaders boosting employment for people with criminal records and scaling powerful solutions that promote economic mobility for people at key touchpoints throughout the justice system.

As our Chair, Stacy Schusterman, Ford Foundation President Darren Walker and Blue Meridian Partners’ CEO Nancy Roob, wrote in a recent editorial in The Washington Post, “Unless businesses, governments and philanthropic organizations recognize that racial equity, economic mobility and justice reform are interconnected, we won’t be able to rebuild America fully and equitably.” In their piece, they make the case that outdated laws and hiring practices are keeping millions of justice-involved Americans from securing jobs while denying our economy a swift recovery.

To learn more, read how the Justice and Mobility Fund:

• Serves as a powerful step toward greater public safety and economic equity (The Washington Post)
• Helps Americans directly impacted by the criminal justice system rejoin the labor force (Barron's)

Our communities need comprehensive and innovative criminal justice reform interventions, and they need them now. To us, the Justice and Mobility Fund is an extension of the partnerships leading this work: experts in building and leading the movement for criminal justice reform and building a new, transformational vision of justice and public safety.

David Weil is Co-President of Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies.
Nancy Fishman is the Senior Director of Criminal Justice Grantmaking at Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies.

Discover more about this work by exploring the Justice and Mobility Fund website and reading the official press release.