Innovation Fund for Safety, Justice, and Opportunity

The University of Chicago Crime Lab and Education Lab are launching an Innovation Fund to partner with individual, corporate, and philanthropic donors to accelerate progress on our city’s most urgent and inextricably linked challenges: reducing gun violence, improving policing, and increasing educational attainment for youth who are bearing the greatest burden of Chicago’s persistent inequities in safety and opportunity.

Innovation Fund investments will be made in ways that directly fund the most promising interventions while simultaneously generating gold standard evidence about the impact and return on investment of these approaches. Through a decade of this work with dozens of partners across Chicago, we understand the critical need for this type of nimble funding to respond to crises – and opportunities – alike. To guide investments, this collaboration will draw on insights from those most proximate to these issues as well as existing data and evidence. The Innovation Fund will commit resources to efforts that need investment now and have high potential for impact, and the Crime Lab and Education Lab will work closely with the public sector to scale the most cost-effective investments.

Please join us and our partners in supporting the non-profits and policymakers tackling the greatest challenges of our day. Together we can work to ensure that Chicago’s best days are ahead and that no Chicagoan is left behind.

The Innovation Fund will focus on investments in three separate, but related, pillars of work: