Today, as many as 3,000 people from 200 organizations across 30 U.S. states are marching on Washington, D.C., with a unified message: The majority of crime victims aren’t interested in traditional “tough on crime” approaches. Instead, they want to reform the system so it focuses far less on punishment and far more on crime prevention and providing the kind of services that help victims heal — and, by doing so, could also prevent further crimes from happening.
It may seem counterintuitive to hold the Crime Survivors Speak march today, just two months before an election in which right-wing forces are using fears about crime to support the GOP’s agenda. But according to organizers and funders behind the effort, the entire point of the march and its timing is to put the voices of crime victims front and center in the national criminal justice debate. To that end, all of the event’s participating organizations have agreed on an 11-point, Right to Heal policy platform. March organizers are working with federal legislators to introduce a federal bill in alignment with the Right to Heal platform in the coming days. And when the event is concluded, participating organizations will return home to kick off a “Heal the Vote” voter registration and turnout campaign — one that it’s safe to say will not be aligned with a traditional “tough on crime” approach.
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.
For his part, Thomas said that he feels that the funding community has done “a great job” investing in the leadership of formerly incarcerated people. “The criminal justice reform community and ecosystem have definitely benefited from these huge investments,” he said. “And what we see now, as part of this event, there’s a huge opportunity for funders to really invest in and embrace victims’ rights, not just as a voice for reform,” but also by supporting survivors in organizing in their local communities to advocate for criminal justice reform and victims’ services.
Building community, pushing reforms, and stopping the “natural reaction” to fears about crime
In addition to flexing political muscle, Just Trust Chief Program Officer Jolene Forman said that the community being built through the past year’s events also offers a form of belonging to crime survivors and a chance for them to find and express their voice. “There’s something really special about this community,” she said. “Attending Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice events has really helped me find a home for myself and an identity as a survivor, where I’ve struggled to do that despite my decades-long career in criminal justice reform.”
The events, she said, are “really tapping into something that all of us, whether it’s through vicarious trauma, direct trauma, or just fear, can relate to, and then uses it to shift to a solutions orientation [and ask] how do we actually lead with safety and better solutions that help communities thrive?”
The Right to Heal policy platform is definitely solutions focused, with proposals including demands to promote community-level violence prevention and other programs over increased incarceration; end the reliance on fines and fees to fund victim services and instead provide sustainable funding to support survivors; and protect crime survivors whose own victimization and response to that victimization has led to arrests and convictions. The platform’s call to protect victims caught up in the punitive justice system is particularly notable, given ASJ’s 2023 research showing that 9 out of 10 people with a criminal record have themselves been victims of crime, compared with less than half of people who have no record. “Hurt people hurt people” may sound like a cliché, but when it comes to crime, the saying is often a fact.
Today’s march is being held to bring these facts to the attention of federal lawmakers, the public and funders. The march and the events leading to it are another step in building a thriving, powerful community of crime survivors, and to help them heal through finding and using the power of their voices. It’s a complementary event to the introduction of national legislation attuned with the Right to Heal policy platform. But just as important as those goals — and maybe more — organizers behind the Crime Survivors Speak march hope to put a roadblock in the way of the recent backlash to criminal justice reform.
“Our goal outside of policy is to make sure that the voices of crime victims are the ones driving what safety looks like in this country,” Thomas said. “As we’ve seen this year and in the 1990s, whenever there’s a spike in crime and violence, our immediate reaction in this nation is to be tough on crime, invest in more cops on the street, and lock people up and throw away the key. That’s always been our natural reaction to this issue. What we’re saying as victims is, that hasn’t worked for us for the past 30 years. We don’t see it working for us today.”
In addition to philanthropy and criminal justice reform, Dawn Wolfe covers issues including abortion rights/women & girls’ giving, LGBTQ+ issues, and philanthropic reform. She is also a crime survivor. She can be reached at: dawnw@insidephilanthropy.com
