The Justice Collaborative Engagement Project

Background

The Justice Collaborative Engagement Project was formed in 2018 and was described by the New York Times as a “new group that analyzes data for voters before district attorney elections.” The engagement project was a project of Tides Advocacy, a fiscal sponsorship arm of the Tides Nexus of left-of-center grantmaking organizations for lobbying and electoral-advocacy projects. It operated as the political companion to The Justice Collaborative, itself a project of Tides Center, the charitable fiscal-sponsorship arm of the Tides Nexus. ^{5 6}

Specific activities of the Justice Collaborative Engagement Project remain unclear. In 2020, its website at tjcengage.org was made private, and it appeared to be fully offline by 2026. ⁷

Political Activities

The Justice Collaborative Engagement Project’s primary stated purpose was supporting the election of district attorneys and local prosecutors who endorsed The Justice Collaborative’s criminal justice platform. The organization was active in 2018 left-wing prosecutor campaigns, a cycle in which various groups sought to replicate the 2017 Philadelphia district attorney race by backing candidates aligned with lenient prosecution in major urban jurisdictions. That year, a coalition of left-wing organizations supported Wesley Bell, who defeated incumbent St. Louis County, Missouri, district attorney Bob McCulloch, the prosecutor who had overseen the 2014 grand jury proceedings following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson. ^{5 4}

Also, in 2018, Engagement Project senior legal counsel Jennifer Soble publicly criticized then-Dallas County District Attorney Faith Johnson (R) for declining to implement left-wing prosecution policies toward low-level offenders. Soble later became the executive director of the Illinois Prison Project, a separate advocacy group focused on early release for long-serving prisoners in Illinois. ^{5 8}

Policy Positions

The Engagement Project endorsed a range of positions drawn from The Justice Collaborative‘s published position statements. These included abolishing all monetary fines in the legal system, declining to prosecute theft and similar offenses when poverty was alleged as a contributing factor, eliminating all youth detention centers nationwide, granting parole access to any individual who had served at least 15 years in prison regardless of the nature of the offense, ending all criminal penalties for prostitution, and mandating automatic expungement of virtually all criminal records following completion of a sentence. ⁹

The Engagement Project also backed The Justice Collaborative’s broader left-wing economic platform, which called for government-administered healthcare, taxpayer-funded housing for all residents, a minimum wage indexed to inflation, a federal job guarantee for anyone who wants one, and the elimination of public transit fares. ¹⁰

The Engagement Project advocated for ending all cooperation between local law enforcement and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and opposed deportations for individuals who had been convicted of crimes. ¹¹

Funding

The Justice Collaborative Engagement Project is a fiscally sponsored project of Tides Advocacy. As such, it did not disclose any of its donors. In January 2019, the National Football League Players Coalition, a group of professional athletes who are involved in philanthropy around racial issues, gave a donation of an undisclosed amount to the Engagement Project. ¹²