Impact Justice

In 2015, I founded an innovation and research nonprofit capable of applying creativity and pushing the boundaries of criminal justice reform beyond what we know it as today. In six years, Impact Justice has grown to more than 80 staff working on a diverse array of projects. As citizens across the country demand justice solutions far more rooted in community, healing, and compassion, the Elevate Prize would take our work to the next level by allowing us to launch a flexible Innovation Fund to seed new criminal justice reforms – solutions sparked by imagination that envision what does not yet exist or operate at scale. 

The Innovation Fund will incubate new innovations without constraints. Innovation involves risk and imagination. I have long thought that the justice reform sector struggles with both, while Impact Justice embraces them. Projects supported by the Fund will partner with stakeholders across sectors. For instance, we may engage agriculture experts to bring vertical farming projects to prisons, or bring restorative justice principles to the elder justice space to reduce harm and facilitate healing. Above all, our innovations will bring to life concrete, actionable ideas with the potential to catalyze change today and tomorrow, not next decade. 

As the Founder and President of Impact Justice, I bring over three decades of work in criminal justice system reform as a federal civil rights prosecutor, staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and leader at the Vera Institute and NCCD. I know well that ending mass incarceration and creating a humane and restorative justice system in the United States calls for new thinking and actionable innovation. I was born in 1962 when there were 250,000 people locked up in our nation. Today there are more than 2.1 million people behind bars. We didn’t get here overnight, and we won’t get out of this nightmare easily.

I have also felt the weight of the justice system, having immediate family members arrested, incarcerated, and suffering the burden of being formerly incarcerated. In 2015, I founded Impact Justice with a simple idea: to create an organization that would imagine, innovate, and accept absolutely nothing about the status quo of our current justice system. 

I bring my commitment to making a difference to the work of Impact Justice. We are taking chances, dreaming big, and helping to create the future we dream of tomorrow as a world we can live in today.  

We police, arrest, and incarcerate too many people in the name of public safety. Too many families, and too many of them people of color, are being broken up and broken by the system, and our culture too often treats people based on fear, stigma, oppression, and bias. 

In 2015, I founded Impact Justice with a simple idea: to create an organization that would imagine, innovate, and accept absolutely nothing about the status quo of our current justice system. Today, I work with more than 80 colleagues to create innovative ideas, bold projects, and cutting-edge research.  

As a national nonprofit innovation and research center, our work aims to tackle critical problems understanding that to solve the criminal justice problem will take more than a criminal justice solution. 

For example, we use restorative justice as an alternative to our current justice system in 10 cities. We released the first national report on food in confinement and are working on a vertical farm project in multiple prisons. We launched the Homecoming Project to provide housing to formerly incarcerated adults using the sharing economy model of Airbnb, and we are leading the federal effort to end sexual abuse in jails and prisons.  

Impact Justice pilots groundbreaking ideas to accelerate justice system change and tackles the toughest criminal justice issues with fresh perspective – whether we’re providing safe homes to people leaving prison, confronting the big data algorithms that drive biased police practices, or addressing the neglected issue of food in prison. 

What makes Impact Justice unique from other nonprofit organizations is that we inject principles of human-centered design into and across our work. Our efforts stem from a fundamental awareness that we are all so much more than what time, circumstance, and history have made of us. With that in mind, we are creating more humane systems of justice by leveraging the wisdom, beauty, and resources of communities to create spaces where people help one another heal; revolutionize the way we think about harm and the environments in which we address it; and support people recovering from the physical and emotional violence inflicted by existing punitive institutions. This vision translates into a track record of developing and scaling solutions that are genuine alternatives to the status quo of mass criminalization. It’s what distinguishes Impact Justice from other organizations.

Our passion for change is rooted in compassion for the individuals and communities diminished and harmed by a punitive approach to what we call justice. We support those same communities to play a larger role in advancing safety and justice for themselves by addressing harm outside the legal system. Our substantial experience building, replicating, and sustaining innovations in the criminal justice space has led to interventions that support formerly incarcerated young adults to become the next generation of community leaders (California Justice Leaders), apply restorative justice practices as an alternative to the justice system for youth and adults (Restorative Justice Project), and leverage existing living spaces to provide housing for people returning home from prison (Homecoming Project). In a short time, these innovations have improved hundreds of lives and have the potential to impact thousands more. 

Today we are ready to take our innovations work to the next level. With an Elevate Prize, Alex Busansky will lead Impact Justice in the creation of an Innovation Fund to support a continuous pipeline of innovations that improve our justice system by collaborating with a wide array of sectors like agriculture, food justice, public health, and urban planning.