A new collaboration by two California criminal justice reform organizations has a unique take on moving money to support incarcerated people: Instead of creating programming for them, the Inside Impact Fund lets people living in prisons decide what they’d like to do. To that end, the fund, which underwent a soft launch this year before becoming public earlier this month, is on track to move $45,000 in support of approximately 80 projects in 23 of California’s 33 prisons. For this first round, individual grants — true microgrants — ranged from $200 to $2,000.
Most of the activities available to incarcerated people are top-down affairs: They’re created by governmental and other agencies, and their goals are determined by the organizations that operate them. Inside Impact, on the other hand, takes a grassroots, bottom-up approach. Each of the activities Inside Impact is funding begins as the dream of someone living in a California prison.
Empowering people who have been stripped of agency in virtually every other area of their lives isn’t the only thing that makes Inside Impact unique: The nonprofit partners behind the fund, Impact Justice and the Anti-Recidivism Coalition (ARC), have recruited a Grants Council comprising formerly incarcerated leaders and advocates to select which projects to support. The first round of requests the fund approved in July includes musical instruments for a women’s band at the Central California Women’s Facility and new white boards and book binding equipment for incarcerated grantees at Sierra Conservation Center.
‘We expect a lot more requests to come’
The idea for Inside Impact originated roughly two years ago, said Alex Busansky, president and founder of Impact Justice, which serves system-impacted individuals in areas including restorative justice and re-entry rehousing. To create the fund, ARC and Impact Justice have each committed $25,000 a year for the first three years of the Inside Impact project. In addition, Impact Justice will house the fund, providing administrative and marketing support.
Inside Impact’s next goals are to raise additional money for the 2025 round of grants and to boost communications so more people living in California prisons will be aware of the fund’s existence. Busansky said that everyone involved hopes to replicate this year’s success — there was just enough money that the Grants Council was able to approve all of the requests they received.
Once more incarcerated people find out about Inside Impact, though, “we expect a lot more [requests] to come,” Busansky said. “We may very well be inundated.”
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‘Behind every number … there is a person’
The Inside Impact Fund may seem like pretty small potatoes in the field of philanthropic funding of enrichment programs for incarcerated people, like the money that the Ascendium Education Group’s Education Philanthropy Division and the Mellon Foundation, to give just two examples, are spending on post-secondary education in prisons. The goal of ensuring that people living in prisons have access to education while incarcerated — and thus, better chances of success when they leave — is a vitally important one, but it’s arguable that more education while inside should be part of the larger project of recognizing the humanity of the people our country imprisons.
Unlike major prison education initiatives, that recognition can be as small as a $200 grant to allow incarcerated people to take yoga, or Gordon Philanthropies’ $10,000 for a children’s library at Men’s Central Jail in L.A. During our conversation, Busansky said, “There are millions of people in prison right now who are not having an opportunity to do things that are part of being a human being. And I think that this project [Inside Impact] isn’t rhetorical or part of a critique or the solution for ending mass incarceration, but it — on a very practical, foundational level — gives people an opportunity to live their daily life differently than they currently get to live it.”
The idea that it’s important to provide people in prisons with the chance to live more fully human lives is a moral one, but it’s also a practical argument that ought to appeal to anyone who wants to increase community safety as a whole.
According to the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, “Decades of research has shown that nearly all people who are incarcerated have experienced at least one potentially traumatic event. Most report exposure to many events across multiple different trauma types.” While it’s true that not everyone who has been a victim of violence goes on to be convicted of an offense, it’s also true that “assaultive violence exposure more broadly, often beginning in childhood, is very common among people who are incarcerated.”
As of 2021, the U.S. spent an annual average of at least $81 billion incarcerating people, many of whom are living examples of the cliché that “hurt people hurt more people.” Meanwhile, some funders spend millions on education for some of those same incarcerated individuals. The question is, what might happen if more funders and others were to follow the lead of efforts like Inside Impact and Gordon Philanthropies and spend much less money per project to allow incarcerated people to lead more fully human lives? Education and therapy are essential, but they can only go so far to help people heal, particularly in a system that deprives them of empowerment and humanity overall.
In a video produced by the Inside Impact Fund, Rabia Qutab, a member of the fund’s Grants Council who was herself incarcerated for 10 years and is now a nationally recognized prison reform leader who works at Impact Justice, offers an idea. “When people think about prison, they often focus on the statistics, but what I wish is more people knew [that] behind every number is a person with real hopes, dreams and the potential for remarkable change.”
In addition to philanthropic attempts to address the criminal justice system, Dawn Wolfe covers issues including women & girls’/abortion rights philanthropy, racial and economic justice, and efforts to reform philanthropic practices. She can be reached at: dawnw@insidephilanthropy.com
