An article in Inside Philanthropy by Dawn Wolfe covers the Crime Survivors Speak March on Washington and the community of funders who helped support the event. Here’s an excerpt:
The march, and preliminary events in California, Florida, and Michigan, were organized by Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice (CSSJ), a program of the national Alliance for Safety and Justice, whose funders include the Just Trust, the Ford Foundation, Galaxy Gives and the Fund for Nonviolence. In addition to its general support of ASJ, which makes all of its work possible, philanthropic funders provided an additional $2 million to support Survivors Speak events in 2024. A wide variety of nonprofits serving survivors of crime are participating, including faith-based organizations and groups focused on people of color, young people, and family members who have lost loved ones to violence. Endorsing organizations include March For Our Lives, the National Center for Victims of Crime, and the National Alliance of Trauma Recovery Centers.
According to Ford’s david rogers, supporting the Survivors Speak March is a natural extension of the funder’s support of crime survivor advocacy, a $16 million and counting legacy that goes back roughly 15 years. Ford’s rogers, a program officer in the Gender, Racial and Ethnic Justice Program, said that the advocacy of crime survivors “is improving the country’s understanding of who crime survivors are, what their experiences are, and what they need and want. This is a movement of directly impacted people who are lifting up what is necessary to build a more effective, prevention-based approach to community safety that also repairs the harm of the punishment paradigm.” Speaking specifically of ASJ, rogers cited Ford’s 2016 Building Institutions and Networks grant to the organization as part of the reason that the nonprofit grew from its 2012 origins as the small California for Safety and Justice to a national organization with more than 60 employees working in nine states.
This approach may seem to fly in the face of conventional wisdom that the most effective way to fund movements is to support smaller, community-based nonprofits that are closest to the issues. At the same time, though, rogers makes the point that when it comes to crime survivor advocacy, “we need to invest in a strong institution that’s going to have a national reach, because that is one way to be able to get at scale.” It’s certainly difficult to imagine any smaller nonprofit being able to bring together 200 of its peers around a common agenda — particularly since, according to ASJ Vice President Aswad Thomas, the idea of the march originated at an ASJ staff retreat in 2019, just five years ago. Thomas is also the national director of Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice.
See the full article at Inside Philanthropy