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Vera Institute was cofounded by a supporter of Pacifica Radio.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Institute_of_Justice

Founding

The Vera Institute of Justice was founded in New York City in 1961 by the philanthropist Louis Schweitzer and the magazine editor Herb Sturz. Both of them considered the city’s bail system at the time to be unjust since it granted release based largely on income. Working with criminal justice leaders, they explored the problem, developed a solution, and rigorously tested it.

Within a few years, they had demonstrated that New Yorkers too poor to afford bail but with strong ties to their communities could be released and still show up for trial. Eventually, the model devised by Vera was adopted in many municipalities across the United States and led to the Bail Reform Act of 1966, which was signed by US President Lyndon B. Johnson and was the most significant reform of the bail system in America since 1789.

Funding and support
In 1966, the Vera Institute of Justice received assistance from the Ford Foundation to turn the foundation into a private nonprofit organization.[4] Vera’s annual operating budget is approximately $25 million. About 66% of its funding comes from work with governments, and the rest is supplied through agencies and other donors.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Schweitzer_(philanthropist)

Louis Schweitzer (February 5, 1899 – September 20, 1971) was a Russian-born United States paper industrialist and philanthropist. He was an executive at the family paper company (now Schweitzer-Mauduit International) until its sale. He purchased the U.S. radio station WBAI from Theodore Deglin for $34,000 in 1957. An idealist, eccentric, and long-time radio enthusiast, Schweitzer ran the station as a personal hobby and an artistic endeavour, broadcasting the latest in music, politics, and ideas.

Schweitzer viewed radio as an art form, but became increasingly disillusioned with commercial radio as WBAI became more successful. After reading about KPFA and Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles, Schweitzer decided to donate WBAI (which was then valued at around $200,000) to Pacifica, and proceeded to do so in January 1960. WBAI became the third Pacifica station.

Schweitzer’s other philanthropic activities included the donation of 1% of his annual income to the United Nations, and the ex gratia purchase of a barber shop on behalf of the barber who had previously rented the premises. Schweitzer’s only requirement was an entitlement to a free haircut after regular business hours upon request.

In 1961, he founded the Vera Foundation, later renamed the Vera Institute of Justice,[1] to reduce the numbers of poor people awaiting trial on New York City’s Rikers Island. Under Schweitzer’s leadership, Vera pioneered the use of controlled, experimental design research methods in state courts. When, in 1966, these experiments convinced the federal government to rewrite the laws governing bail in criminal cases, President Lyndon Johnson credited Schweitzer.

Schweitzer also proposed a “juvenile disarmament” resolution to the UN whereby toy guns and water pistols would be prohibited as an initial step towards effective disarmament and arms control. In response to criticism that this was a naive and quixotic proposal, Schweitzer stated, “The naive should inherit the earth because the realists have done such a lousy job”.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/nyregion/herb-sturz-dead.html

Herbert Jay Sturz was born on Dec. 31, 1930, in Bayonne, N.J., a gritty oil refining port just across from Staten Island, to Jacob and Ida (Meirowitz) Sturz. His father, a Jewish immigrant from Austria-Hungary, owned a local saloon with his brother.

Herb worked behind the bar as a teenager. And as a fan of the New York Giants baseball club, he was primed to root for underdogs.

After a bout with polio during high school dashed his hopes to play tournament tennis and left him with a withered right hand, he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin and a master’s in education from Teachers College at Columbia.

Traveling in Europe, he met Elizabeth Lyttleton, with whom he wrote a well-reviewed novel about Spain, “Reapers of the Storm” (1958). They married in 1958. Ms. Sturz founded what became Argus Community, a program in the South Bronx for troubled youths, the mentally ill and drug addicts; she died in 2010.

Mr. Sturz is survived by his daughter, Anna Lomax Chairetakis Wood, a scholar with the Association for Cultural Equity at Hunter College; a step-grandson; a step-great-grandson; and, in addition to Lisa Sturz, several other nieces and nephews.

He married Margaret Shaw, a lawyer and mediator, in 2012. She died in 2017.

After editing Boys’ Life magazine, Mr. Sturz was recruited by Louis J. Schweitzer, a chemical engineer and philanthropist, in founding the Vera Institute of Justice in 1961. A research organization named for Mr. Schweitzer’s mother, it was established to address the inequities faced by indigent people who become entangled with law enforcement and the courts.

After directing Vera for 17 years, Mr. Sturz was picked by the newly elected Mayor Edward I. Koch in 1978 to be his deputy mayor for criminal justice. The next year he was named director of city planning, a job in which he curbed the height of mid-block high-rises, kicked off the redevelopment of Times Square and changed zoning rules to spare Broadway theaters from demolition.

After stepping down as director in 1986, he continued to press his agenda in print as a member of The Times editorial board and later through philanthropy, as a senior adviser to George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. There, he further expanded his purview to include bail reform abroad as well as affordable housing in South Africa.

Nearing 90, he continued to confront a catalog of seemingly intractable social problems with a consistent strategy of invoking firsthand research to transform skeptics into stakeholders.

In June 2019 he semi-retired to become a part-time, pro bono consultant to the Open Society Foundations.