As Colorado heads toward the midterms, a bigger question for justice philanthropy: Are we funding individual victories—or building cumulative progress?
A few weeks ago, I attended the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition’s Voices for Justice gala and learned about an organization I hadn’t been paying enough attention to: Advance Colorado.
Then I looked at the ballot.
Colorado voters will decide 14 statewide measures this November. Eight of them—more than half the statewide ballot—have ties to Advance Colorado. They touch immigration, energy, hunting and fishing, voting, ballot language, redistricting, taxes and criminal justice.
On their face, these are separate campaigns about separate issues.
But Advance Colorado doesn’t describe them that way.
The organization calls itself Colorado’s “leading conservative policy and advocacy organization.” Its stated mission includes challenging progressive policies and putting the state on a different path. And its work doesn’t stop with ballot initiatives: it advocates at the Capitol, works in communities and media, litigates, and trains emerging leaders.
That got me thinking less about what Advance Colorado is trying to accomplish—and more about how the rest of us think about progress.
A campaign can win without the field moving forward
In the justice field, we are very good at identifying individual objectives: Pass the bill. Defeat the ballot measure. Change the sentencing law. Expand reentry. Reduce incarceration. Protect a previous reform from repeal.
Funders evaluate proposals against those objectives. Organizations build coalitions around them. Advocates mobilize. Researchers produce evidence. Communications teams shape the public argument.
Sometimes we win.
But there is a question we ask much less often: What did the win build?
And perhaps the bigger question: Did the win move the field closer to a recognizable destination?
That’s a funding question
Philanthropy tends to fund things it can identify like a campaign or a program. That makes sense, because capital requires accountability. But it can also mean that we are exceptionally good at accounting for what money did and much worse at understanding what the investment built.
Advance Colorado caught my attention because its individual campaigns sit inside an explicitly articulated direction. Its own language describes the organization as working across multiple arenas to change Colorado’s policy trajectory.
Does the progressive movement have a trajectory? If a foundation funded sentencing reform in 2016, reentry in 2019, prosecutor reform in 2022 and a defensive campaign protecting one of those victories in 2026, were those four successful grants? Or were they four investments in something larger?
If they were investments in something larger, can we name what they collectively built?
COJA is beginning a study of justice campaigns from roughly the last decade to try and answer that question. We’re interested in what happened to the capacity created around them: Can different investments, organizations and strategies produce cumulative movement in a recognizable direction?
That is a different way of thinking about alignment, which is pretty much what we’re all about.
November 3 isn’t the finish line
Proposition 132 makes this question particularly tangible for the justice field.
Advance Colorado argues that increasing fentanyl penalties will improve public safety. CCJRC opposes the measure and argues that harsher penalties will worsen the drug crisis rather than address addiction and undo all the gains that have been made to curb mass incarceration. Nonpartisan legislative analysts estimate that the measure would increase state spending, potentially reaching $68.2 million annually by its fifth year. Colorado voters will decide between those approaches in November.
Whatever happens, November 3 will produce more than a collection of wins and losses. It will become part of what comes next.
That’s the piece I think we need to understand better.
What we’re studying next
COJA is examining justice campaigns from the past decade to understand what happens after the win: what capacity survives, what gets lost, what the next campaign inherits, and whether individual investments are adding up to cumulative progress.
If you fund, lead or have worked inside justice campaigns, we want to hear from you. Reach out to COJA to contribute to the study or learn more about what we’re finding.
