The Open Philanthropy Project awarded a grant of $250,000 to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California to support prosecutorial accountability work led by Ana Zamora. This grant falls within Open Philanthropy's work on criminal justice reform.
The ACLU of Northern California is a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting and advancing the civil liberties of Californians. It plans to use this grant to support its “What a difference a DA makes” project. This project will include three main elements:
- Building District Attorney (DA) accountability infrastructure in target counties by providing criminal justice reform training and support to local groups in advance of 56 DA elections in California in 2018.
- Building a website with information on the DAs in all California counties to increase transparency and accountability.
- Conducting messaging research to learn what approaches to criminal justice reform communication are most effective and developing a messaging framework.