How to donate to help criminal justice reform and racial justice: An effective altruism perspective on resources and where to donate
Summary
If you are interested in donating to help the cause of criminal justice reform and racial justice, here are some tips for choosing where to donate:
Look for expert recommendations.
Look for regranting organisations.
Make regular donations.
Look for expert recommendations
Who counts as an expert when it comes to donating to a charitable organisation?
One kind of expertise is held by those working in the organisations themselves, although it is possible that most people working in charitable organisations consider their own organisation to be doing a great job.
How do we minimise bias when it comes to evaluating which organisations are having the largest positive impact?
Another kind of expertise is found in program managers and fund managers for certain philanthropic foundations.
An analogy can be made with investing in stocks: most CEOs would say their company is doing well. But some fund managers and investors have an overall view of the area, and can make a systematic evaluation of which organisations have the most impact.
The idea of systematically evaluating charities by how their interventions work in practice is similar to the practice of systematic reviews of clinical trial evidence in medicine to decide which drugs work and which do not.
Open Philanthropy Project is a large fund that has made grants of almost $1 billion to various organisations working in global health, biosecurity, pandemic preparedness, nuclear safety, and other cause areas.
Their research is published online by focus area, such as this page (see above) on criminal justice reform. The program manager, Chloe Cockburn, previously worked for the ACLU’s Campaign to End Mass Incarceration.
Grant recommendations by Open Philanthropy Project are some of the most highly cited among the effective altruism community.
Chloe Cockburn, program manager for criminal justice reform at Open Philanthropy Project, recently listed a number of organisations worth donating to right now in an interview with Vox for their vertical on effective altruism, Future Perfect.
Her standout recommendation: Movement for Black Lives
This was due to their legitimacy as a ‘movement anchor’.
Also, Movement for Black Lives regrants funds to over 150 different organisations based on need, including:
- Color of Change
- Black Movement Law Project
- Black Lives Matter Network
You can donate here via ActBlue.
Look for regranting organisations
Why are regranting organisations so important?
Immediately after the death of George Floyd and subsequent protests, so many people donated to Minnesota Freedom Fund — a sum of $20 million at the time — that it had to ask people to stop sending donations.
A better, more efficient option is to look at organisations that can regrant funds to other organisations according to need. Many of the donation links shared on social media at the time were to an organisation called ActBlue.
What is ActBlue? ActBlue is a nonprofit that enables Democrats, progressive groups, and nonprofits to raise money on the Internet through online fundraising software. ActBlue are independent of the Democratic Party.
ActBlue helped raise $20 million in one day (Monday 1 June 2020, NY Times) for groups fundraising in connection to protests surrounding the death of George Floyd.
ActBlue itself has previously promoted a page (see above) which regranted funds to a wide range of organisations working on racial justice and criminal justice reform.
This is often a better option than just donating in one place.
Donating to ‘meta’ organisations, or organisations that fund other organisations, can often be a good way of your impact having a multiplier effect.
For example, without ActBlue, it is unlikely that $20 million could have been raised so quickly for so many small organisations as they provided essential infrastructure.
In some cases, the impact of $1 donated to a meta organisation will be larger than the impact of donating ‘directly’ because that initial investment helps the meta organisation raise in effect more than $1 total for other organisations. However, multipliers are difficult to measure.
You can donate directly to ActBlue here.
Make regular donations
Too often, those interested in donating to important causes neglect the long-term impact of financial support.
For most charities, a predictable and sustainable flow of income is preferable, as it allows organisations to make plans for the future and take on larger, more impactful projects.
When donating using a service like ActBlue, there will often be an option to make it a regular donation — you should use this option.
Pick a level of donation that is sustainable for you.
Many in the effective altruism community give 10% of their income split across many different causes.
But even 1% is better than nothing.
Another benefit to donating regularly is that it keeps us honest.
The continuous reminders of where we are donating and how much means that monitoring those donations for effectiveness becomes much easier.
You should continuously be reading, listening, and thinking carefully about where to donate and what organisations are likely to have the most impact.
That might be through attending events, listening to podcasts, reading research online, going to meetups, or something else.
Thanks for reading!
If you enjoyed this, you can read more about effective altruism on Wikipedia here.
Who wrote this?
I’m Henry Cooksley. In my spare time I’m an organiser at Effective Altruism London, a registered charity.
The effective altruism community is a diverse range of people working globally on a number of different causes, including global health, animal welfare, longtermism, political stability, and criminal justice reform.
Partners and places we work:
