Transforming Criminal Justice Grants

Transforming Criminal Justice Grants

Funder: The Navigation Fund

Status: Active

Geographic Scope: United States focus

Mission: End mass incarceration while promoting the true safety and well-being of communities

Context: The United States spends approximately $445 billion annually on the carceral system and incarcerates people at one of the highest rates in the world. The program recognizes that mass incarceration has never been a viable path toward safer communities and supports a comprehensive approach prioritizing human dignity, accountability, repair, and rehabilitation.

Funding Priorities:

1. Expanding Non-Carceral Solutions

• Strategies that increase public safety while offering alternatives to policing, pretrial detention, probation, and prisons
• Community violence intervention
• Restorative justice
• Substance use and harm reduction
• Non-police crisis response
• Priority: Community-led models that eliminate or significantly reduce contact with system

2. Advancing System Innovation and Accountability

• System innovation efforts to accelerate decarceration
• Training and exposure to new methodologies for key practitioners (e.g., public defenders)
• Hold system and actors accountable through litigation, technological advancements, and other groundbreaking strategies

3. Supporting Impactful Change Campaigns

• Community organizing and education
• Legislative advocacy
• Direct services as base-building practice
• Campaigns must: remove barriers to improve quality of life for directly impacted people, shrink system scope/size, or bring unlikely allies into the fight

4. Increasing Strategic Communications

• Expand and strengthen journalist training
• Reporting on non-carceral solutions centers human dignity and data (not sensationalism)
• Rapid-response communications highlighting proven non-carceral solutions
• Infrastructure for sustaining long-term narrative change

What They Fund:

Organizations and initiatives aligned with priorities

Unrestricted and project-based funding

Multi-year grants

Fiscally sponsored projects and international charitable organizations (where relevant)

Program Officer: Erin Keith

Contact: grants@navigation.org

Application Process: Invitation-only, rolling year-long grantmaking structure prioritizing efficiency

Overhead and Indirect Cost Policy: Available on website

Collaboration: Open to pooled funding, co-funding opportunities, and strategic advising with institutional funders and individual donors