Vera Institute of Justice — Common Justice

[Criminal Justice Reform] The Open Philanthropy Project recommended a grant of $8,000 to the Vera Institute to support Common Justice. Common Justice, a Brooklyn-based project of the Vera Institute, develops and promotes solutions to violent crime that focus on improving outcomes for victims and holding people accountable for harm without relying on incarceration. We wrote more about the organization on our page about our previous grant to Common Justice. This is a "no-process" grant. For no-process grants, the grant investigator (in this case Chloe Cockburn, our Program Officer for Criminal Justice Reform) can recommend the grant without needing to go through our normal process of providing their reasoning, discussing with the team, and providing input on and review of our public page. These grants are limited to a relatively small proportion of our grantmaking, and some other stipulations apply to what types of grant are eligible. The overall aim is for us to be able to move forward on relatively small and low-risk grants, based purely on the judgment of a single staff member and with minimal delay. In keeping with the lack of process, we don't plan to publish in-depth pages about the reasoning behind these grants.