Arabella Advisors (commonly called “Arabella”) is a philanthropic consulting company that guides the strategy, advocacy, impact investing, and management for high-dollar left-leaning nonprofits and individuals. 1 Arabella provides these clients with a number of services that ease their operations and that enable them to enact policies focused on environmentalism and other left-of-center issues. 1 The company was founded in 2005 by Eric Kessler, a Clinton administration alumnus and long-time staffer at the League of Conservation Voters. 2
Arabella Advisors manages six nonprofits that serve as incubators and accelerators for a range of other left-of-center nonprofits: the New Venture Fund, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the Hopewell Fund, the Windward Fund, the North Fund, and the Impetus Fund.
These nonprofits have collectively hosted hundreds of left-wing policy and advocacy organizations since the network’s creation (referred to by critics as “pop-up groups” because they are little more than websites.) 3 4
The North Fund, is significantly funded by Arabella’s nonprofits, housed at the company’s address, and pays Arabella Advisors consulting fees. 5 According to a job listing posted on LinkedIn in November 2022 for the position of “Senior Vice President (SVP), Managed Organizations” 6 with the company, Arabella describes its nonprofits as “Managed Organizations” 6 and seems to describe the relationship between them and the organization as a “heavily matrixed working environment.” 6
In 2020, Arabella’s nonprofit network boasted total revenues exceeding $1.67 billion and total expenditures of $1.26 billion, and paid out $896 million in grants largely to other left-leaning and politically active nonprofits. 7 In 2019, Arabella’s nonprofits reported combined revenues of $731 million. 8
Altogether, between 2006 and 2020 Arabella’s network reported total revenues of $4.7 billion and total expenditures of $3.3 billion. 9 A January 2020 profile of Arabella Advisors’ network by Inside Philanthropy noted that the company “handles over $400 million in philanthropic investments and advises on several billion dollars in overall resources.” 10
These funds originate primarily with major left-of-center foundations and individual donors, not with the company Arabella Advisors, and are controlled by the nonprofits, which in turn “hire” Arabella Advisors to consult in exchange for a fee. Many of Arabella’s top officials, including firm founder Eric Kessler and former managing director Bruce Boyd, are current or former principal officers on the nonprofits’ boards of directors. 11 Between 2008 and 2021, Arabella’s nonprofits paid the company a combined total of at least $230 million in contracting and management services fees. 12
Arabella’s nonprofit network has implemented over 300 different “pop-up” projects targeting a range of issues, including net neutrality, free speech, abortion access, Obamacare, and President Donald Trump’s judicial nominees, and was highly active in funding pro-Democratic Party advertisements in the 2018 and 2020 elections. Its groups were also active in trying to manipulate the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Census in left-leaning states and the subsequent 2021-22 redistricting process, when state legislative and congressional districts were redrawn by state legislatures. 13 14 15 Multiple former Arabella employees have also been traced to the Biden administration. 16
Arabella Advisors specifically highlights projects in which it has helped its clients divest millions of dollars from traditional energy companies, invest in risky experimental companies, boycott the historically Republican-leaning U.S. Chamber of Commerce, enact a ballot initiative that freed 4,000 criminals in California, and lobby for a labor union-friendly policy in Oregon that was supported by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and the Oregon Nurses Association. 17
Arabella and its nonprofit network have been criticized as “dark money” funders both for channeling hundreds of millions of dollars from left-leaning foundations to left-wing organizations and for hosting hundreds of “pop-up groups”—websites designed to look like standalone nonprofits that are really projects of an Arabella-run nonprofit. 18 However, Arabella’s nonprofit network also manages a number of “philanthropic projects” engaged in genuine charity, not political advocacy. 10
In April 2021, the New York Times criticized Arabella’s “system of political financing, which often obscures the identities of donors,” as “dark money,” calling the network “a leading vehicle for it on the Left.” 19
In November 2019, Politico criticized the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the 501(c)(4) advocacy wing of Arabella’s nonprofit network, as a “little-known,” “massive ‘dark money’ group [that] boosted Democrats” in the 2018 midterm elections with $140 million. “The money contributed to efforts ranging from fighting Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and other Trump judicial nominees to boosting ballot measures raising the minimum wage and changing laws on voting and redistricting in numerous states,” the left-leaning website reported. Politico also noted that Sixteen Thirty Fund’s biggest single donation (made anonymously) was for $51.7 million, “more than the group had ever raised before in an entire year before President Donald Trump was elected,” adding that “the group’s 2018 fundraising surpassed any amount ever raised by a left-leaning political nonprofit.” 20 However, Politico failed to fully connect the Sixteen Thirty Fund to Arabella Advisors’ nonprofit network.
The left-leaning Washington Post further criticized Arabella’s Sixteen Thirty Fund as a “big campaign donor” in a November 24, 2019 opinion by the editorial board, which called on Congress to change nonprofit disclosure laws, noting in particular a $26.7 million anonymous donation to the Fund. 21 However, the Post also failed to connect the Sixteen Thirty Fund to Arabella Advisors and its other three nonprofits.
In a November 24, 2019 letter to the editor published by the Washington Post, Capital Research Center (CRC) president Scott Walter identified the $26.7 million donation as originating with the New Venture Fund, the largest of Arabella’s in-house nonprofits, and confirmed Politico’s suspicion that the Sixteen Thirty Fund is “part of a larger network of dark money.” 22
In 2021, The Atlantic called Arabella’s network “the massive progressive dark-money group you’ve never heard of” and Arabella Advisors the network’s “mothership,” adding: “Democrats have quietly pulled ahead of Republicans in untraceable political spending. One group helped make it happen.” In the Atlantic’s interview with Arabella’s then-CEO Sampriti Ganguli it called the Sixteen Thirty Fund “the indisputable heavyweight of Democratic dark money” which funneled “roughly $61 million of effectively untraceable money to progressive causes,” making it the “second-largest super-PAC donor in 2020.” 23
“Dark Money” Criticism
Arabella and its nonprofit network have been criticized as “dark money” funders both for channeling hundreds of millions of dollars to left-wing organizations and for hosting hundreds of “pop-up groups”—websites designed to look like standalone nonprofits that are really projects of an Arabella-run nonprofit. 18 38
In April 2021, the New York Times criticized Arabella’s “system of political financing, which often obscures the identities of donors,” as “dark money,” calling the network “a leading vehicle for it on the Left.” 19 In May 2021, the New York Times criticized Arabella’s New Venture Fund and its 501(c)(4) “sister” nonprofit, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, for their close ties to and funding from the foreign-funded Wyss Foundation, calling Sixteen Thirty Fund one of the “leading dark money spenders on the Left” responsible for distributing more than $63 million in super PAC donations that hurt Republicans and aided Democrats in the 2020 election, as well for “help[ing] create and fund dozens of groups, including some that worked to block Mr. Trump’s nominees and push progressive appointments by Mr. Biden.” 39
In November 2019, Politico criticized the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the 501(c)(4) advocacy wing of Arabella’s nonprofit network, as a “little-known,” “massive ‘dark money’ group [that] boosted Democrats” in the 2018 midterm elections with $140 million. “The money contributed to efforts ranging from fighting Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and other Trump judicial nominees to boosting ballot measures raising the minimum wage and changing laws on voting and redistricting in numerous states,” the left-leaning website reported. ….
The left-leaning Washington Post further criticized Arabella’s Sixteen Thirty Fund as a “big campaign donor” in a November 24, 2019 opinion by the editorial board, which called on Congress to change nonprofit disclosure laws, noting in particular a $26.7 million anonymous donation to the Fund. 21 However, the Post also failed to connect the Sixteen Thirty Fund to Arabella Advisors and its other three nonprofits.
Private Funding of Elections (2020)
In 2020, the Arabella-run New Venture Fund provided close to $25 million in funding to the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL), a left-of-center nonprofit that passed roughly $350 million to thousands of elections offices in the form of COVID-19 “relief funds” ahead of the 2020 election, money which originated with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. 41
New Venture Fund’s grant was CTCL’s second-largest donation in 2020. 42
CTCL’s private funding of election offices was widely criticized. In January 2022, the Wall Street Journal editorial board called for the practice to banned by the states: “Zuckerbucks Shouldn’t Pay for Elections” because “it fans mistrust to let private donors fund official voting duties.” 43
Unlawful Private Funding of Elections Lawsuit (2021-2022)
Also see Center for Secure and Modern Elections (Nonprofit) and Center for Tech and Civic Life (Nonprofit)
OpenSecrets identified five Facebook pages (Colorado Chronicle, Daily CO, Nevada News Now, Silver State Sentinel, Verified Virginia) that “gave the impression of multiple free-standing local news outlets,” but are in fact “merely fictitious names used by the Sixteen Thirty Fund,” Arabella’s 501(c)(4) lobbying nonprofit. 52 These pages published Facebook political advertisements that favored Democrats and left-wing causes during the 2020 election. After the report was published a number of these pages were deleted.
States Newsroom, which runs another network of left-wing “fake news” websites, was originally created as “Newsroom Network,” a project of the Arabella-run 501(c)(3) Hopewell Fund. In June 2019, States Newsroom was spun off as an independent nonprofit with its own 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status, but a number of its local affiliates are used by the Hopewell Fund as its own legal aliases. 53
While States Newsroom does not disclose its donors (and is not required to by the IRS), 51
IRS application records obtained by OpenSecrets show the States Newsroom was offered a $1 million donation from the Wyss Foundation, a private foundation primarily funded by Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss, who made his fortune as CEO of a controversial medical device manufacturer called Synthes.
A financial statement in the IRS records obtained by OpenSecrets shows that the States Newsroom plans to bring in more than $27 million in contributions before the end of 2021.
And in 2018 the Hopewell Fund gave $1.72 million to News for Democracy, which OpenSecrets points out “was at the crux of a network of seemingly independent Facebook pages disguised as news outlets that started spending on digital ads in 2018,” with backing from the Sixteen Thirty Fund and Investing in US, an investment vehicle funded by LinkedIn founder and liberal billionaire Reid Hoffman. 51
Also among these “dark money” groups was ACRONYM, which raised $9.4 million from “secret donors” through April 2019, including $250,000 from Arabella’s 501(c)(3) New Venture Fund. ACRONYM is affiliated with a super PAC, PACRONYM, which spent close to $18 million aiding Democrats and hurting Republicans through independent expenditures in the 2020 election. 54 ACRONYM also owns and operates Courier Newsroom, which in turn manages a network of left-wing websites that present themselves as local news outlets while spreading “hyperlocal partisan propaganda,” according to the centrist watchdog Newsguard. 55 Courier Newsroom spent at least $20,000 in digital advertising campaigns on Facebook between March 2019 and May 2020; its total spending in Facebook ads as of June 2021 is nearly $1.4 million. 56 51
The Atlantic: Arabella’s Political Activism Masked as Philanthropy
Arabella’s increasing prominence as the head of a large and influential network of political groups has earned the company attention from both left- and right-leaning media, which respectively praise or criticize Arabella’s political activism as it exists in the guise of “philanthropy.”
InsidePhilanthropy, a left-leaning website that examines trends in charitable giving, praised Arabella Advisors founder Eric Kessler in July 2021 as one of the 100 “most powerful players in philanthropy” for aiding “progressive causes” through his nonprofit network: 57
Since he founded Arabella Advisors in 2005, Kessler has built a complex network of nonprofit funds and pass-through entities that now channel hundreds of millions toward progressive causes annually—giving that soared under Trump.
