A few years ago, when Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan created the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, they took some heat for incorporating it as an LLC—since such entities can operate with little transparency.

But the young couple are not alone among top donors in choosing this model—Laurene Powell Jobs and Pierre and Pam Omidyar also have LLCs—and there are good reasons to look beyond the traditional foundation structure. The LLC is a much better vehicle for the kind of multi-faceted approach to big problems that Chan and Zuckerberg favor.

Criminal justice is a new focus for CZI, and this work is led by Sasha Post, who previously worked at FWD.us, the Center for American Progress and the Open Society Foundations.

Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg have become increasingly interested in this issue over time. They visited San Quentin in 2015 and earlier this year held a roundtable in Birmingham Alabama, where they met with community leaders, including the criminal justice reformer Bryan Stevenson. Mark has also said that he was influenced by Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness.

This is also a ripe issue for philanthropic intervention right now, with the pendulum swinging away from a Draconian law-and-order approach. Living donors and legacy foundations alike have been targeting new resources here, including Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna, who’ve recently begun major grantmaking on criminal justice reform.

Read the full article at Inside Philanthropy