Amity and Californians for Safety and Justice

The Amity Foundation was recently featured in the ‘Partner Profile’ of the Californians for Safety and Justice newsletter. Californians for Safety and Justice’s stated mission is to advance smart justice strategies that increase public safety and reduce justice system costs. Aligning with Amity’s mission, both organizations have partnered together in a dedicated effort to replace over-incarceration with new safety priorities.

You can read more about Californians for Safety and Justice on their website: https://safeandjust.org/

The ‘Partner Profile’ spotlighting Amity CEO Doug Bond was circulated in their newsletter and can be found below:

The nonprofit Amity Foundation is among the nation’s largest and most dynamic providers of reentry programming—not to mention housing, education and community building. It’s CEO, Doug Bond, has twice been a beneficiary of its services. In 1983, not long after the organization was founded and when both his parents were in prison, Doug was among the first children to be placed in Amity custody, after being removed from foster care. Years later, his mother—who by then had become an Amity employee—helped enroll him in a residential treatment program for adults returning from prison.

“I thought I had nothing in common with anybody because I had never been to prison,” he recalls, “but I learned so much about myself and engaged in a self-actualization process of transformation that was life changing for me.”

Over the next decade, Doug also learned a lot about Amity’s process, business and operations, working with—and being mentored by—senior leaders of nearly every project and department of the growing organization, which today serves thousands of clients across California and beyond. One of its newest projects, the Returning Home Well Initiative, is a $30 million public/private partnership supporting reentry and reintegration for nearly 12,000 people who were released from California prisons in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Doug’s deep connection to Amity has made him a powerful advocate for it and similar community-based organizations that are close to the populations they serve. “The government cannot do this work without us,” he says. “I realized how much more valuable we are to them and our community.”

He makes a similarly strong case for strategic, long-term government investment to build the capacity of community-based organizations to help reduce the overuse of incarceration. “Think of the investment that was made in the prison system to make it what it is today,” he says. “We need a comparable investment into our community-based infrastructure to ramp that down.”

“My goal for people is that we’re impacting 30-year outcomes, not six month cycles based on government contracting,” he says. “We need to be asking, How are we changing generational cycles? How are we impacting the community for the future?”