Program and Communication Support to Accelerate Death Penalty Abolition https://grants.dudleytdoughertyfoundation.org/proposals-2021/program-and-communication-support-to-accelerate-death-penalty-abolition https://grants.dudleytdoughertyfoundation.org/@@site-logo/sitelogo-75x75.png

Program and Communication Support to Accelerate Death Penalty Abolition

Additional Information
Used for	Death Penalty Focus is seeking a $30,000 general operating support grant from the Dudley T. Dougherty Foundation. These funds will expand our capacity to educate, organize, and support efforts to abolish the death penalty in California, at the federal level, and across the country. We will use these funds to support additional communications and program capacity. All our work is aimed at abolition of the death penalty and saving lives.
Benefits	With this grant, we will be able to provide more educational programming, mobilize supporters to sign petitions, call governors and prosecutors to forgo death sentences, and enhance our social media and on-the-ground presence, working always for death penalty abolition. With added capacity, we will be able to move quickly toward abolition in California and to work with others to support abolition and life-saving measures for those on federal death row and across the country.
Proposal Description	Death Penalty Focus is seeking a $30,000 general operating support grant from the Dudley T. Dougherty Foundation. These funds will expand our capacity to educate, organize, and support efforts to abolish the death penalty in California, at the federal level, and across the country. We will use these funds to support additional communications and program capacity. All our work is aimed at abolition of the death penalty and saving lives. History of DPF: Founded in 1988, DPF has always led abolition efforts in California and is a trusted and faithful ally to death penalty abolition efforts and individuals facing death across the US and internationally. Each year it mobilizes its board, followers, and supporters to write to governors and pardons and parole boards seeking mercy or commutation. It authors opinion pieces, and mobilizes faith leaders, victim family members, and celebrities to speak out in opposition to the death penalty. It works to educate legislators and voters to understand the reality of the cruel, arbitrary, and racially biased death penalty system in this country. As the only organization in California dedicated solely to death penalty abolition, DPF was the anchor organization leading the California ballot initiatives to abolish the death penalty in 2012 and 2016. Each of those initiatives lost by only a few percentage points but demonstrated that Death Penalty Focus has the capacity to lead efforts aimed at statewide abolition. Thanks to DPF’s strategy and continued work to educate, advocate, and organize, opposition to the death penalty has increased in California. In May 2021, just five years after the defeat of the last initiative, a new poll conducted by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies showed that support for the death penalty was declining by approximately five percent since the initiative. With almost 700 people on death row in California, more than any other state in this country or any country in the Western Hemisphere, our work is critical. Although the work of DPF and its allies has been successful in stopping any executions in California since 2006, the situation for people on death row remains precarious. How we used past support from Dudley T. Dougherty Foundation In December 2019, DPF received a general operating support grant from the Dudley T. Dougherty Foundation. Over the course of 2020, even with the interruptions caused by Covid-19 that forced us to modify our plans, DPF worked to spread the word about abolition efforts across the state and country, increased our use of social media, and hosted six virtual webinars highlighting voices of innocent people exonerated from death row, family members of murder victims, faith leaders, and prosecutors who oppose the death penalty. We launched our new website in 2020 and organized our extensive email list to target outreach more carefully and strategically to our followers. While the database and website work are not exciting to most, it was very exciting to us because it allows us to leverage our supporters more effectively across the state and country. We are extremely grateful to the Foundation for your partnership. What did we do in 2021? Over the last year, DPF continued to grow our email list, which is now over 100,000, and our social media presence. We engaged a communications consultant to create original content that urges supporters to petition governors and parole boards for mercy or action on behalf of people sentenced to death and contact legislators to educate them about essential abolition and related criminal justice reform. We posted hundreds of messages on Twitter and Facebook and started an Instagram account which is gaining momentum. We collected over 2700 signatures asking President Biden to commute the death sentences of the men on federal death row and spread the word about public hearings on the death penalty in California where a number of our followers presented testimony. Our increased communications capacity facilitated resumption of our monthly newsletter, the Focus, with original content covering developments in criminal justice reform in California and around the country, commentary and analysis by policymakers, academics, and lawyers, and interviews with committed abolitionists, including people of faith, death row exonerees, and prisoners sentenced to death or life without parole. We have initiated a new series of webinars, with four to be completed before the end of calendar 2021, and others in the early stages of planning for 2022. The first three reached hundreds of viewers, with many more viewing online after the initial showing. We hope the fourth, “The Death Penalty Brutalizes Us All,” which runs on December 8, 2021, will also attract a large viewing audience. We think these programs have been very successful and we will expand our webinars (and we hope in-person educational events!) in 2022. The next two years: Over the last six months, a DPF Board Program Committee, chaired by Professor Stacey Mallicoat, worked with Interim Executive Director Maddy deLone to develop a program plan to establish priorities for DPF’s work over the next two years. We created this plan by reviewing current DPF plans, national abolition strategy reports, talking with leaders at over a dozen organizations in California, and working nationally, to set priorities in areas where DPF could make a significant difference and to focus our activities to ensure maximum effect. To fully implement this plan, DPF will need to expand its capacity with additional staff and or consultants in the areas of community organizing, communications, and grant writing. Currently, DPF does its work with two staff (one part-time) and a communications consultant. A $30,000 grant will help us expand our capacity and continue our good work. The plan will focus our California efforts on reducing the number of people sent to death row through resentencing and convincing the Governor to use his clemency powers. This strategy is in line with those in the California Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and the November 2021 recommendations of the California Committee for the Revision of the Penal Code. We will expand our network of exonerated men and women and find new ways to engage our vast network of supporters. We will work with our coalition partners in California to carefully monitor the political landscape in the state to prepare for the time that a successful ballot initiative can be launched. That time does not appear to be in the next two years, so we will continue to educate and organize in preparation for that critical moment. The second area of focus will be the federal system. The President has stated his opposition to the death penalty. We have joined with others to urge President Biden to commute the sentences of those now on federal death row. We will work with colleagues across the county to convince him to spare the lives of the 45 men currently on federal death row and help ready the nation for federal abolition. Finally, we will support efforts across the country to save the lives of people on death row and efforts at the state level to abolish the death penalty, much as we did with the recent victories for Julius Jones of Oklahoma and Pervis Payne of Tennessee. Conclusion: DPF is poised to lead death penalty abolition efforts in California and to support others around the country. We will continue to use our core tools of organizing, educating, and mobilizing. A general operating grant of $30,000 would make an enormous difference to our efforts and allow us to expand our capacity to help meet our new program plan. We are grateful for the opportunity to apply and welcome your continued partnership. Please feel free to contact Maddy deLone (maddy@deathpenalty.org) if there are any questions.