Just Trust CEO Ana Zamora on Why Criminal Justice Reform Is a Philanthropic Issue

When we think about criminal justice reform, we often think about activism, politics, or legal advocacy; we don’t normally think about mass incarceration as a problem that philanthropy can solve. But Ana Zamora is out to change that. As the director of criminal justice reform at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Zamora was responsible for handing out millions of dollars in grant money to organizations working on the ground to implement practical solutions to mass incarceration.

And as Founder and CEO of Just Trust, an independent criminal justice reform investment organization, she’s distributing $350 million in grant money to address the persistent inequities in the criminal justice system.

Thinking of criminal justice reform as a philanthropic issue—rather than a legal or a political one—has helped Zamora and her organization unlock new solutions to problems that seem to resist easy fixes.

I spoke to Zamora back in March. She described how her brother’s incarceration fueled her interest in criminal justice reform, why this issue isn’t as simple as the left vs the right, and how philanthropic dollars can help keep more people out of American prisons.

Tune in every Thursday, and join us as we continue to explore the minds that shape our world. You can listen to the full episode above, and below are a handful of excerpts from our conversation that have been condensed and edited for clarity.

On how her older brother’s experience with the criminal justice system informs her work today:

My brother had been stealing from my parents and stealing from other people. There was a warrant out for his arrest and my parents didn’t know what to do. They were at a loss, they were at their wits end. And they did the only thing that I think our society offers parents in that situation, which was to call the police and have their son arrested. And that’s what they did. And so I remember hearing a knock on the door one night and seeing police officers come into our house and handcuff my brother right down the stairs from my little pink bedroom with all my stuffed animals. And that is burned into my memory. I was between eight and ten, I would say. This is something I’ve never talked to any of my family about.

My brother is an amazing human. And he suffered a lot with his addiction. He is now in recovery, and he has been for a number of years. And he is thriving right now in spite of the trauma that he faced being wrapped up in the criminal justice system. And it took all of us a long time to talk about what happened in those years, including my brother. And before I started sharing my family’s story, I asked him, “Jorge, how would you feel if I started sharing, our story, your story?” And he said, “Ana, if you sharing my story can help other people and actually help change the way things happen, the way the criminal justice system works, then I want you to share it loud… and far.”

On how advocacy, law, and philanthropy work together to create impact:

I think that advocacy is a really, really critical tool for criminal justice reform in particular, because without advocacy creating the demand and taking this issue out of the darkness and putting it into the light and showing lawmakers and the general public that we have solutions. It’s just easier to sweep it away. And advocacy requires philanthropic support. These are nonprofits that rely on philanthropic support to do their work. Even though I worked at the ACLU, which is arguably one of the most well-resourced nonprofits, particularly on criminal justice reform, the reality is this work was vastly underfunded and the advocates working on the ground across the country—from the death penalty to drug law reform—were doing so on shoestring budgets and really making a good amount of progress despite those shoestring budgets. And so that’s why I think philanthropy and nonprofits and advocacy are so critically important to this issue in particular. And we absolutely need lawmakers. We need champions that are willing to take the risk and say, ‘hey, maybe we shouldn’t just lock everybody up and expect that to increase public safety and make people feel safe in their homes at night. Maybe we need to do something different. I want to try something different.’ That takes courage, and you need advocates to support those lawmakers. You need advocates to tell different stories to the media and help reporters see that there’s other ways to cover crime and public safety. All of that requires philanthropic support to catalyze change.

On how Dr. Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg’s 350 million dollar investment in the Just Trust in 2021 is helping to revision criminal justice reform:

The 350 million investment from Mark and Priscilla, I think, catalyzes the next generation of criminal justice reform. And I think that the next generation of criminal justice reform needs to really focus on solutions. If we’re not going to send people suffering from substance use disorder or mental health crises or poverty, if we’re not going to be sending people to jail and prison because we agree that that’s not a great intervention, then what are we going to be doing? I can’t stress enough how important the bipartisan aspect of this was. We had Republicans and Democrats not always saying the same thing, but everybody agreeing that this was a problem and it was solvable. And one of the things I’m most proud of at the Just Trust is one of our programs called the Safer Communities Accelerator, where we are using some of these dollars to invest in community based solutions that work hand in hand with local law enforcement, to keep people who shouldn’t have a criminal justice intervention from getting one. Getting folks treatment, getting folks a bed to sleep in, getting folks services that are much better at helping them rather than sending them to jail. And there’s examples of this all over the country right now. And what I’m excited about is really supercharging these community based solutions with resources and helping them to really show the world that what they’re doing is working and it’s allowing local law enforcement more time to deal with the things that we need police to deal with, like solving serious crime.

On the challenges of working at the intersection of philanthropy and criminal justice reform:

These things take a long time. And I think one of the challenges with philanthropy is this desire to measure and demonstrate impact in too short of a time frame. All that does is push nonprofits to go too far too fast. And I think that that can have really negative consequences. So for me, it’s about building an ecosystem of organizations that each play a different role. So some organizations are going to be really focused on narrative change and really, helping the public see that there are other solutions out there to improve public safety. Another organization is going to be focused on legislative advocacy, like insider baseball, going into the Capitol, lobbying lawmakers. Another organization is going to be organizing impacted communities and bringing those stories and those individuals to the Capitol to talk to lawmakers or share their stories with the public. I firmly believe that we need that ecosystem. And all of those groups need to have funding in order to advance this work forward in a pace that makes sense with politics and culture—knowing, knowing that sometimes we will go the other direction. This is not for the weak hearted. This is hard work. You do lose a lot doing this work. And just when you think you’re making a lot of progress and you’ve reached that tipping point, sometimes things go in the other direction and you have to persevere. And when things start going in the other direction, that’s when you gotta really drill down, stick to your guns and keep pushing forward.

Write to Charlotte Alter at charlotte.alter@time.com.