Our Vision

Abolition is possible.

Funders for Justice envisions a world where the prison industrial complex and all of its interwoven parts no longer exist, and in its place, communities have the financial, political, social, and cultural resources they need to define and build safety, wellness, and healing with and for each other. We work in partnership with our member funders and with movements for racial, gender, and economic justice, ending criminalization, and building models for promoting community safety and justice, to redistribute philanthropic dollars investing in that long-term process and vision.

We Are Creating a Political Home for Collective Action

FFJ is a space of education, alignment, and action for funders to grow their knowledge of abolition and solutions to violence without state intervention, organize their peers and colleagues to shift funding to grassroots community-based organizing, disrupt the power of the opposition, and redistribute funding to abolitionist and anti-criminalization movement building. At FFJ, funders grapple with the dissonance within their foundations and the sector at-large that highlights the ways that philanthropy perpetuates harm and undermines a long-term abolitionist vision.

We Are Building the Abolitionist Knowledge and Analysis of the Sector

FFJ is a place to learn together and have difficult conversations about where we are vs. where we want to be. We center a Black feminist and disability justice history and vision of abolition of the prison industrial complex in our training, leadership development, and organizing strategies, and our learning spaces help funders tease out the differences between abolitionist approaches and those that feed systems of policing, surveillance, and state violence.

We Are Leveraging Our Power for Alignment Across Philanthropy

FFJ builds and leverages its collective power to redirect, guide, and shift our members’ actions, whether through changes in their grantmaking practices, participation in statements of solidarity, or public support for grassroots movements for racial, gender, and economic justice, ending criminalization, building models for community safety and justice, and abolition of the prison industrial complex. We build strong relationships to flank each other and our movement partners.

We Are Shifting and Changing Grantmaking Practices and Portfolios

Over the past nearly eight years, FFJ has mobilized millions of dollars to movement building to end criminalization and promote community safety and security. We provide fundraising strategy support directly to grassroots organizations – from helping to craft fundraising materials to building relationships with funders. Together, we rise to meet the mandates of movements: to redistribute philanthropic resources to frontline activists and organizers dedicated to ending all forms of criminalization and violence by centering the wisdom, leadership, and legacies of racial, gender, and economic justice movements.