The Racial Justice Collaborative (RJC) funded partnerships of lawyers and community organizations to use legal and other tools to achieve equity and fairer policies for communities marginalized by race, ethnicity and immigrant or citizenship status.
The RJC was a partnership of foundations and individual donors consisting of a national fund and three state and regional grantmaking funds (in California, North Carolina and Massachusetts-Rhode Island). In addition to its grantmaking, the RJC incorporated intensive peer learning for both grantees and donors to:
- Build visibility of an emerging practice in the racial justice field;
- Magnify the impact of individual efforts and add volume to new voices in public discourse around racial justice issues;
- Facilitate collaboration among grantees to form a more strategically connected whole with relating messages and stories; and
- Build the capacity within philanthropy to support racial justice innovation by helping funders explore how structural exclusion based on race and ethnicity may impact their programs.
Grantmaking and Projects
The RJC made multiyear grant commitments totaling $6.1 million to 43 organizations nationwide. RJC funding supported such work as legal advocacy to advance equitable educational policies that assure quality education for all North Carolina children regardless of race or class status, and efforts in Louisiana to address the disparate impact of the juvenile justice system on youth of color. RJC is no longer in operation.
Key Donors
National fund donors included the Ford Foundation, Levi Stauss Foundation, Maurice Falk Fund, Open Society Institute, Philanthropic Collaborative and the Rockefeller Foundation.
