Alliance Magazine | What if we funded justice differently?

Across our conversations, we heard this repeatedly: justice doesn’t always begin in a courtroom. It begins when someone feels safe enough to speak. A community paralegal helping a villager resolve a land dispute. A former inmate is mentoring others inside prison. A survivor navigating the police station without fear.

At organisations working on reintegration and rehabilitation, justice often means supporting people in rebuilding their lives after incarceration. With flexible support, some partners have been able to offer socio-legal counselling, vocational training, and basic necessities. Others have built trust-based leadership programs that help young people move from the margins into positions of voice and responsibility. These are concrete, person-centred acts of justice.

In other cases, early patient funding helped organisations survive and scale when few others were willing to take the risk. That support enabled them to formalise their teams, build institutional systems, and communicate the broader narrative of their work. Crucially, the flexibility to plan a few years ahead allowed them to take bigger bets by investing in people, tools, or platforms that wouldn’t have been feasible under restricted project grants.

So why hasn’t philanthropy embraced this space more fully? A few blind spots keep recurring. First, the “tangibility bias”: funders like measurable outputs like vaccines delivered and schools built. Justice work is relational. It may take years before a policy shifts, a case sets precedent, or an ecosystem changes. But that doesn’t mean impact isn’t happening.

Second, many funders worry that justice work is adversarial or political. But the reality is that most of our partners work with, and not against, state institutions. We’ve seen collaborations with NITI Aayog, state and national legal aid authorities, courts, and correctional institutions. These are solutions, not confrontations.

Lastly, most funding structures don’t fit justice work. Short-term, output-driven grants don’t support the long game of legal empowerment or systemic reform. The most effective partners spoke about how they often had to start by showing up, listening, and building trust. Change didn’t happen in quarters. It happened in relationships.

When funding aligned with the nature of the work, things changed. Many partners credited long-term, unrestricted funding with giving them breathing space, not only to operate effectively, but to think expansively. They used that space to invest in leadership, respond to community needs in real time, and take risks they otherwise couldn’t afford to take.

Flexible support also allowed organisations to do the unglamorous but vital work of capacity-building: from hiring experienced staff, to building internal systems, to developing learning tools. Instead of chasing compliance, they could focus on what mattered by deepening their fieldwork, building networks, and responding to unexpected opportunities.

Organisations that combined legal literacy with cultural and emotional work, such as storytelling, expressive arts, or peer-led theatre, often spoke about the importance of being able to integrate these elements without having to argue for their “impact” in narrow terms. Being trusted to pursue what worked, even when it looked unconventional, helped the work land more deeply and durably.

So what would it look like to fund justice differently?

1. Commit for the long haul. Fund justice like you would fund a promising health system intervention. Offer multi-year, flexible support. Treat experimentation and adaptation as part of the process and not red flags.
2. Trust, then track. Start from a place of belief, then co-create learning approaches that suit the work. Let partners define what success looks like. Don’t ask for outcomes the work isn’t built to deliver.
3. Think systems, not silos. Justice isn’t a standalone sector. It intersects with gender, education, livelihoods, and governance. Fund the connective tissue: the organisations translating legal rights into lived realities.
4. Celebrate stories, not just numbers. A woman starting her own paralegal network. A district officer shifting how bail is granted. A reintegration program reducing recidivism. These are real outcomes, even if they’re not on a logframe.
   The partners I’ve learned from are not naïve. They know change takes time. But they’ve also shown that with the right kind of support, it is absolutely possible. They’ve built models, passed policies, won cases, and healed lives.

What they seek is not charity. It’s a partnership. Not pity. But patience.

So here’s the question again: What if we funded justice differently?

We would move it from the margins to the centre. We would fund what matters, not just what’s easy to measure. And we would finally stand beside the people who are already doing the quiet, necessary work of building a more just India.

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Gautam John is CEO of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies.

The author is part of a philanthropy that supports access to justice initiatives. The views expressed here are based on learning reports (2021–2025) and interviews with partners working on Access to Justice in India)