Grantee Support Systems
CJI pioneered 360 degree-support grantmaking with a streamlined application and reporting process and helps applicants and grantees every step along the way in ways that yield big returns.
Capacity Building Program
The Circle for Justice Innovations offers a full range of grantee support programs and initiatives that reinforce our unique role as the first philanthropy to identify, fund, and develop the leadership capabilities of the Criminal Justice movement’s most cutting-edge changemakers. Four additional activity areas round out CJI’s Circle grantmaking operations:
- Capacity Building Program
- Restoring Our Movement Project (ROMP)
- Restorative Justice Responses to Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) Project
Capacity Building Program
Over our twenty years of experience as philanthropy focused on supporting younger, smaller grassroots organizations engaged in racial and social justice work, CJI recognizes that some organizations require more than mere funding to effectively launch and lead transformative advocacy campaigns that mobilize communities. As a result, CJI offers applicants, grantees, and past grantees direct access to our comprehensive Capacity Building Program to help strengthen their leadership capabilities.
Under the program, directly impacted movement leaders can receive training focused on fundraising, communications, budgeting and finance, advocacy strategies, but also self-care techniques to support their efforts to eliminate the harmful policies and practices over the long term.
CJI’s Capacity Building Program seeks to develop the overall strength and effectiveness of our grantee organizations by providing instruction in the nitty-gritty areas of board development, fundraising, nonprofit communications, cyber security, and cultural responsiveness.
Our regular offerings enhance grantees’ ability to respond to the needs of new and emerging impacted populations and promote strategies to enhance the well-being of grantee organizations’ leadership to sustain effective programming while also coordinating access to third-party services and fostering collaborations between grantees.
Restoring Our Movement Project (ROMP)
The Circle for Justice Innovations is all about living our principles. We know from experience that it is possible to unintentionally harm one another in the course of our work, and that movement organization can even implode due to unresolved internal conflicts.
CJI launched its Restoring Our Movement Project (ROMP) with the goals of strengthening our organization and the people who drive forward its work, emboldening our movement and its people with renewed resiliency, and achieving a fundamental transformation of the criminal legal system in the process. ROMP draws on the wisdom of Restorative Justice practitioners in CJI circles and throughout the movement to design mechanisms that address harm from a framework of healing, restoration, and recovery, rather than traditional processes that are based on the same racist systems activists seek to dismantle.
Through ROMP, CJI researches and gathers industry “best practices,” including via conversations with the community, to create a shared knowledge of our working environment. Next, ROMP brings together restorative practitioners to work through the issues with our organization. Finally, CJI seeks to create our own shared vision, language, and definitions of what a restorative organization looks like and how it functions.
ROMP draws from multiple lineages and traditions to build out this new approach, including Native circle-keeping, African ancestral and reconciliation practices, the women’s movement, novel practices in the field of education, and more. As part of this ongoing process, CJI works to incorporate decolonizing language, restorative practices, and equity of voice in the structures we build and pays special attention to our work pace and rhythms. Our resulting Human Resources environment will provide a firm foundation for building strong relationships and trust among colleagues, a commitment to trauma support and healing, and a work culture rooted in anti-colonialism.
ROMP represents an opportunity for CJI to develop an organizational practice model that can be used by other community-based groups and participatory grantmaking programs to incorporate restorative principles in their work. Building on conventions developed over 20 years of cross-class, cross-race participatory funding, CJI is documenting a set of policies and procedures that can help strengthen other organizations’ capacities to identify, hold, and resolve the conflicts—so often based on trauma—that consistently undermine their effectiveness.
Restorative Justice/Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) Collaborative
CJI’s Restorative Justice Responses to Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) Project is based on the needs of survivors from communities of color, indigenous, queer, and other marginalized communities, who seek interventions that avoid the criminal legal system, are culturally relevant, do not threaten their partners or families with deportation or incarceration, and address harm in the context of social, economic, and cultural realities.
Under IPV, CJI collects data on promising practices and community capacities for employing restorative justice responses to intimate partner violence. IPV allows CJI to anchor a partnership with community groups to build on the recommendations of the New York City Blueprint on Restorative Justice and Intimate Partner Violence [Link] by developing a collaboration of culturally responsive practitioners to build community capacity to use restorative practices for IPV, piloting restorative intervention circles, and documenting innovations toward supporting survivors and interrupting mass incarceration.
Capacity Building Program
Grantee Support Systems
CJI pioneered 360 degree-support grantmaking with a streamlined application and reporting process and helps applicants and grantees every step along the way in ways that yield big returns.
The Circle for Justice Innovations offers a full range of grantee support programs and initiatives that reinforce our unique role as the first philanthropy to identify, fund, and develop the leadership capabilities of the Criminal Justice movement’s most cutting-edge changemakers. Four additional activity areas round out CJI’s Circle grantmaking operations:
- Capacity Building Program
- Restoring Our Movement Project (ROMP)
- Restorative Justice Responses to Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) Project
Capacity Building Program
Over our twenty years of experience as philanthropy focused on supporting younger, smaller grassroots organizations engaged in racial and social justice work, CJI recognizes that some organizations require more than mere funding to effectively launch and lead transformative advocacy campaigns that mobilize communities. As a result, CJI offers applicants, grantees, and past grantees direct access to our comprehensive Capacity Building Program to help strengthen their leadership capabilities.
Under the program, directly impacted movement leaders can receive training focused on fundraising, communications, budgeting and finance, advocacy strategies, but also self-care techniques to support their efforts to eliminate the harmful policies and practices over the long term.
CJI’s Capacity Building Program seeks to develop the overall strength and effectiveness of our grantee organizations by providing instruction in the nitty-gritty areas of board development, fundraising, nonprofit communications, cyber security, and cultural responsiveness.
Our regular offerings enhance grantees’ ability to respond to the needs of new and emerging impacted populations and promote strategies to enhance the well-being of grantee organizations’ leadership to sustain effective programming while also coordinating access to third-party services and fostering collaborations between grantees.
Restoring Our Movement Project (ROMP)
The Circle for Justice Innovations is all about living our principles. We know from experience that it is possible to unintentionally harm one another in the course of our work, and that movement organization can even implode due to unresolved internal conflicts.
CJI launched its Restoring Our Movement Project (ROMP) with the goals of strengthening our organization and the people who drive forward its work, emboldening our movement and its people with renewed resiliency, and achieving a fundamental transformation of the criminal legal system in the process. ROMP draws on the wisdom of Restorative Justice practitioners in CJI circles and throughout the movement to design mechanisms that address harm from a framework of healing, restoration, and recovery, rather than traditional processes that are based on the same racist systems activists seek to dismantle.
Through ROMP, CJI researches and gathers industry “best practices,” including via conversations with the community, to create a shared knowledge of our working environment. Next, ROMP brings together restorative practitioners to work through the issues with our organization. Finally, CJI seeks to create our own shared vision, language, and definitions of what a restorative organization looks like and how it functions.
ROMP draws from multiple lineages and traditions to build out this new approach, including Native circle-keeping, African ancestral and reconciliation practices, the women’s movement, novel practices in the field of education, and more. As part of this ongoing process, CJI works to incorporate decolonizing language, restorative practices, and equity of voice in the structures we build and pays special attention to our work pace and rhythms. Our resulting Human Resources environment will provide a firm foundation for building strong relationships and trust among colleagues, a commitment to trauma support and healing, and a work culture rooted in anti-colonialism.
ROMP represents an opportunity for CJI to develop an organizational practice model that can be used by other community-based groups and participatory grantmaking programs to incorporate restorative principles in their work. Building on conventions developed over 20 years of cross-class, cross-race participatory funding, CJI is documenting a set of policies and procedures that can help strengthen other organizations’ capacities to identify, hold, and resolve the conflicts—so often based on trauma—that consistently undermine their effectiveness.
Restorative Justice/Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) Collaborative
CJI’s Restorative Justice Responses to Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) Project is based on the needs of survivors from communities of color, indigenous, queer, and other marginalized communities, who seek interventions that avoid the criminal legal system, are culturally relevant, do not threaten their partners or families with deportation or incarceration, and address harm in the context of social, economic, and cultural realities.
Under IPV, CJI collects data on promising practices and community capacities for employing restorative justice responses to intimate partner violence. IPV allows CJI to anchor a partnership with community groups to build on the recommendations of the New York City Blueprint on Restorative Justice and Intimate Partner Violence [Link] by developing a collaboration of culturally responsive practitioners to build community capacity to use restorative practices for IPV, piloting restorative intervention circles, and documenting innovations toward supporting survivors and interrupting mass incarceration.