- Deadline
- Passed
Open Society-U.S.’s Soros Justice Fellowships fund outstanding individuals to undertake projects that advance reform, spur debate, and catalyze change on a range of issues facing the U.S. criminal legal system.
We are taking a moment to pause and analyze the future of our three U.S. based fellowship programs. This means we will not be issuing a call for proposals for 2025 fellows, as we would have done this fall.
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Year
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Aishah Shahidah Simmons
2020Aishah Shahidah Simmons will use storytelling to explore survivor-centered ways to disrupt and end childhood and adult sexual violence without relying on the criminal justice system. -
Connie Wun
2020Connie Wun will research the sex trade landscape, and in partnership with those who have participated in the trade, highlight the experiences of Black, Indigenous, women, girls, and gender nonconforming communities of color. -
Denali Wilson
2020Denali Wilson will serve youth charged in adult courts in New Mexico by litigating excessive and extreme sentences and fighting for policy change. -
Elizeth Virrueta Ortiz
2020Elizeth Virrueta Ortiz, through the Resistance Sin Fronteras project, will build the power of migrant and monolingual Spanish-speaking families impacted by police violence. -
Eric Paulk
2020Eric Paulk will build a nationwide network of Black HIV movement lawyers to protect, defend, and support people living with HIV. -
Jazmarie Melendez
2020Jazmarie Melendez will build a movement of young people who are most harmed by policing and immigration enforcement, empowering them to challenge how these intersecting systems impact their lives. -
Jeremy McQueen
2020Jeremy McQueen will develop a four-part dance film exploring systemic racism and injustices through the real-life accounts of New York City youth embroiled in the justice system. -
Julie Mao
2020Julie Mao will challenge mass migrant prosecutions and government surveillance, and work with immigrant families and organizers to tell the story of the harms such prosecutions and surveillance cause. -
June Kuoch
2020June Kuoch will use arts-based organizing to catalyze an abolitionist queer feminist orientation within the Southeast Asian antideportation movement. -
Maria Mari-Narváez
2020Maria Mari-Narváez will document and combat state violence in Puerto Rico. -
Marilyn Lee
2020Marilyn Lee will promote beekeeping as a way for formerly and currently incarcerated women and men to achieve financial security, independence, and stability. -
Phal Sok
2020Phal Sok will create an action-oriented, community-based toolkit that explains the history of immigration policy and its criminalization. -
Shanita Hubbard
2020Shanita Hubbard will develop a podcast series that explores the intersection between environmental racism and the prison industrial complex. -
Siwatu-Salama Ra
2020Siwatu-Salama Ra will draw upon the leadership of formerly incarcerated people to build bridges between and power within the environmental and climate justice movements and the prison abolition and defund police movements. -
Tamisha Walker
2020Tamisha Walker will research current and past movements for mass liberation to help inform current and future efforts to advocate for social change. -
Toya Lewis
2020Toya Lewis will help build a network of informal workers to resist and combat their criminalization and promote their collective prosperity. -
Wakumi Douglas
2020Wakumi Douglas will examine and promote cutting edge healing justice trends, and tools within the existing movement, to end mass incarceration. -
Waleisah Wilson
2020Waleisah Wilson will mobilize differently-abled people in the U.S. South who have been directly impacted by arrest, conviction, incarceration, probation, or parole. -
Xochtil Larios
2020Xochtil Larios will lead a transformational educational opportunity for youth held in Alameda County’s Juvenile Hall. -
Alisa Roth
2014Alisa Roth will develop a series of radio and print stories that explore how the criminal justice system has become the de facto mental healthcare system for so many people across the country. -
Andrea Ritchie
2014Andrea Ritchie will document and promote policy reforms and litigation strategies that address the specific ways in which discriminatory policing impacts women of color. -
Dolores Canales
2014Dolores Canales will expand the involvement of incarcerated peoples’ families in an effort to decrease mass incarceration and end the use of solitary confinement. -
Esi Mathis
2014Esi Mathis will train and mobilize a cadre of citizens directly impacted by the issue of young people serving long, adult sentences. -
Gina Clayton
2014Gina Clayton will establish an organization designed to help women with incarcerated loved ones become leaders in the struggle against mass incarceration. -
Kristen Bell
2014Kristen Bell will work to implement a groundbreaking new California law that allows for the early release of people serving long, adult sentences for crimes they committed as youth.
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Year
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Brandon Brown
2024Brandon Brown and Catherine Besteman will educate, coordinate, and interrupt the flow of people into prisons through building a robust, reparative, healing alternative to incarceration in the wake of harm. -
Catherine Besteman
2024Catherine Besteman and Brandon Brown will educate, coordinate, and interrupt the flow of people into prisons through building a robust, reparative, healing alternative to incarceration in the wake of harm. -
Claudia Muñoz-Castellano
2024Claudia Muñoz-Castellano will educate and create a Texas statewide legal empowerment program to combat the alarming rise in criminalizing policies and practices that target immigrants. -
Deborah Small
2024Deborah Small will study the impact of local efforts to “reimagine public safety,” focusing on the effectiveness of the initiatives, enhancing trust between law enforcement and the community, and addressing systemic issues. -
Elizabeth Kennedy
2024Elizabeth Kennedy will research deportees to El Salvador and Honduras, focusing on youth, Indigenous and Garifuna communities, the LGBTQI+ population, and survivors of sexual and gender-based violence. -
George Morton
2024George Morton will establish an initiative that elevates the vast expanse of Black narratives and fosters the transformation of Black people as artists and art subjects. -
Gina Jackson
2024Gina Jackson and Lea Wetzel will build a national model of peer support and best practices for missing and murdered Indigenous Womxn (MMIW/G). -
Kelly Davis
2024Kelly Davis will research the needs and experiences of pregnant people who have been incarcerated, to inform and advance a broader policy agenda based on gender-based violence, reproductive justice, and criminal justice reform. -
Lauren Faraino
2024Lauren Faraino will engage in legal and storytelling advocacy to investigate, and expose, and halt the unlawful practice of harvesting organs of people who die while incarcerated without family permission. -
Laverne Thompson
2024Laverne Thompson will craft a dynamic community archive of the groundbreaking efforts of Louisiana’s advocates and visionaries who paved the way for criminal justice reform in Louisiana. -
Lea Wetzel
2024Lea Wetzel and Gina Jacksin will build a national model of peer support and best practices for missing and murdered Indigenous Womxn (MMIW/G). -
Nia Lee
2024Lee will spearhead a national series for justice-impacted Black and Brown queer women, femmes, trans, and gender-expansive individuals to create a platform for dialogue, community building, and transformative justice spaces. -
Temi Mwale
2024Temi Mwale will examine how technology produces state violence and harm through the criminalization of Black communities, with a unique focus on the parallels between the United States, the United Kingdom, and Brazil. -
Tijanna Eaton
2024Tijanna Eaton will support authors who have served time in United States prisons, jails, and immigration detention centers, with wraparound coaching and services to develop books sharing their vital stories.