Blue Meridian Partners, the Ford Foundation, and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies have announced a fund with initial commitments totaling $250 million in support of efforts to strengthen the economic mobility of people involved with the criminal justice system.

About seventy-seven million people in America, or roughly one in three adults, have criminal records, and millions are denied a meaningful path to economic opportunity, even decades after their original offense took place. The Justice and Mobility Fund already has invested $145 million in nine organizations in support of solutions to create economic opportunities for the millions of people involved with the criminal justice system — solutions across multiple touchpoints in the system, from pre-arrest diversion, to reentry job training and pathways, to living-wage employment. The fund supports comprehensive approaches including policy development and advocacy, direct services to individuals, narrative change that centers the voices of individuals engaged with the system, and place-based initiatives. In working to advance an equitable recovery from the economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the fund is focused on supporting training and skill building to help individuals secure living-wage jobs as well as efforts to make it mainstream practice for employers to hire, retain, and advance individuals with criminal records.

Grant recipients include the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO) — the nation's largest reentry employment provider — which is expanding its digital skills and financial systems training programs to new sites; the Clean Slate Initiative, an effort to deploy technology and advocacy campaigns to automatically expunge eligible criminal records and lift barriers to employment, housing, and benefits; the Alliance for Safety and Justice, which works in the ten states with the highest incarceration rates to advance a vision of shared safety that reduces incarceration, eliminates barriers to opportunity for people with prior records, and improves outcomes for crime victims; and the Vera Institute of Justice, which works to promote antiracist justice solutions to transform all areas of the U.S. justice system, including policing, prosecution, prison conditions, reentry, and immigration.

"In this moment of reckoning and recovery, investing in the economic mobility of millions of people ensnared by the justice system is a key frontier in the struggle for safe and thriving communities," said Ford Foundation president Darren Walker. "The Justice and Mobility Fund's unique collaboration and contribution expands crucial access to jobs, training, and opportunity to break the cycle of poverty and ensure justice-involved people can thrive. We welcome peers in philanthropy to join and scale this effort, because when individuals are stable, whole communities are stabilized."

(Photo credit: Center for Employment Opportunities)