A Summer for Justice, with Chloe Cockburn

Chloe Cockburn is a lawyer, an activist, and an organizer. She currently leads strategy on criminal justice reform for Open Philanthropy, a research and grant-making foundation that identifies giving opportunities, makes grants, and publishes its findings publicly. Prior to joining Open Philanthropy, Chloe oversaw state policy reform efforts at the ACLU’s Campaign to End Mass Incarceration, and before that she worked with the Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Sandy movements, which led her to better appreciate her role as a connector between funders and activists.

We spoke to Chloe last summer, when those connected worlds were in overdrive. Prison populations were among those hardest hit by the Coronavirus, and weeks of intense protests had followed the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of police, sparking new awareness and focus on systemic racism and the need for criminal justice reform. Chloe took a break from her work and family to walk us through the woods near her home in the Catskills. Her dog Logan came along.