Applications for the next round of the Inside Impact Fund grants will open in early 2025.
You can reach out to insideimpactfund@impactjustice.org to get in touch with us about the application process and more details to come in early 2025!
Here’s how it works:
Anyone incarcerated in a California state prison can request support from the Inside Impact Fund. All CDCR facilities are eligible to participate, but facilities with fewer resources will be prioritized. Based on current resource levels, San Quentin Rehabilitation Center will not be included.
Requests for funding are gathered by Community Resource Managers at each of California’s 34 prisons and then forwarded to Impact Justice to be reviewed by the Fund’s Grants Council.
Incarcerated people can request supplies, tools, and other physical items or funding to cover operational costs (e.g. stipends or travel expenses for professionals or other experts) that are essential to the proposed initiative. The fund does not make direct cash donations to incarcerated individuals; rather, we support the programmatic needs of projects and initiatives started and led by incarcerated people. Examples include (but are not limited to) speaker fees, donated items like books, art supplies, and new technology.
The Grants Council meets annually to decide which projects to fund. Drawing on their expertise and informed by their own prior lived experience in a California prison, they discuss each project and make the difficult decisions about which projects to support. We prioritize institutions that have fewer resources and existing programming. Once the final list of projects is selected, the Inside Impact Fund either purchases items requested directly (in the case of material requests like books or musical instruments), pays outside parties directly (in the case of requests like speaker fees), or if necessary provides funds to CDCR to make material purchases directly.
