Arabella Advisors 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, gender-handouts, and other left-of center prerogatives.[2]
Additionally, Arabella manages four nonprofits that serve as incubators and accelerators for a range of other left-of-center nonprofits including the New Venture Fund and the Sixteen Thirty Fund. [3]
Arabella claims to have implemented over 150 different projects. It 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 a lobby for labor union privilege in Oregon that was supported by the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and the Oregon Nurses Association. [4]
Arabella Advisors was founded by Eric Kessler, a Clinton administration alumnus and long-time staffer at the League of Conservation Voters. [5]
Organizational Overview
Arabella Advisors is a strategic consulting and management company that works with individual donors and large left-of-center non-profits. [6]
Founded in 2005,[7] Arabella has 150 employees.[8] It maintains offices across the country and helps its clients implement their left-wing agendas through sometimes risky programming investments or the creation and incubation of new agenda-driven initiatives or organizations.[9] Arabella claims to have carried out more than 150 domestic and international projects for clients with combined assets worth more than $100 billion.[10]
The company touts that it helps its donor clients develop and implement programs and campaigns that produce left-of-center-social and policy changes. The company brings its wide-range of left-wing nonprofits together to collaborate and exchange ideas on how to implement left-of-center policies.[11]
Arabella manages over $75 million in strategic grants for clients who seek to use their money to implement left-of-center policies.[12] It also guides the “impact investing” of its clients who seek to invest their money in ways that further a left-leaning mission.[13]
In 2017, in response to the election of President Donald Trump, Arabella founder Eric Kessler called for donors to increase their support for organizations that planned to take bold actions on liberal environmentalist, gender-preferential, and government-funded healthcare policies.[14]
Nonprofit Management
Arabella manages four nonprofits, three of which are 501(c)(3) entities and one of which is a 501(c)(4) organization. All serve as incubators and accelerators for a range of other left-of-center nonprofits.[15]
These non-profits are:
The New Venture Fund (NVF), which to date has run over 280 projects across a range of left-of-center issues. In 2016, NVF oversaw $325 million in funding for over 150 projects. [16]
The Windward Fund, Arabella’s “featured” environmental project. It supports donors advocating for environmentalism.[17]
The Sixteen Thirty Fund, which partners with a range of left-leaning donors to lobby for public policy changes, and which uses targeted and strategic political activities to achieve their social and environmental goals.[18]
The Hopewell Fund, which helps left-of-center donors and activists launch new initiatives.[19]
Arabella touts that through the NVF it created the Media Democracy Fund, a group supported by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations,[20] and which pushes for left-of-center internet-related policies.[21]
Similarly, Arabella’s Sixteen Thirty Fund has been described as a “progressive advocacy group” and has created a number of offshoot entities that advocate for liberal policies.[22] One such group, Americans For Tax Fairness Action Fund, advocates for “progressive tax reform.” Another organization, Make It Work Action, pushes for liberal labor policies.[23]
The Sixteen Thirty Fund funneled nearly millions of dollars from Atlantic Philanthropies to “Unity ’09: Moving a Progressive Policy Agenda in America” a liberal effort to support President Barack Obama’s policy agenda.[24] Conversely in 2017, Sixteen Thirty Fund gave over $600,000 to the left-wing Center for Community Change Action, a group organizing opposition to the Trump administration.[25]
Issue Areas
Arabella’s main issue areas focus on left-of-center environmentalist, gender, and food policies.[26]
Shareholder Advocacy and Oil Divestment
Arabella has issued reports touting how nonprofits use shareholder advocacy to push for environmentalist prerogatives including carbon reduction mandates and a boycott against the Republican-leaning U.S. Chamber of Commerce.[27] Arabella also pushes for financial divestment from traditional energy companies in favor of experimental environmentalist energy companies and issued a report touting that companies holding $1.3 trillion in assets have pledged “to both divest and invest in clean energy and climate solutions.”[28]
Mandatory Paid Sick Leave
Arabella touts that it worked to create the Everybody Benefits Coalition in 2012, a project of Family Forward Oregon funded by the Rockefeller Family Fund, to lobby for a statewide paid sick leave mandate in Oregon. The coalition included a number of labor-aligned advocacy groups including the Working Families Organization alongside labor unions such as United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), and the Oregon Nurses Association.[29]
Looser Sentencing Laws
In 2014, Arabella coordinated grant funding from a number of left-leaning nonprofits including the Ford Foundation, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF), the Public Welfare Foundation, and other to form the Vote Safe 501(c)(4), which successfully funded a $10 million ballot initiative campaign to loosen California sentencing laws and release approximately 4,000 convicted criminals.[30]
Other Issues
The company also helps its clients carryout programs across other left-of-center issue areas including economic, education and healthcare-based issues; “equity and social justice” issues; and global redistribution issues. [31]
People
Sampriti Ganguli is the CEO of Arabella Advisors.[32]
Eric Kessler is the founder of and a principal at Arabella Advisors. He also serves as chair of the New Venture Fund (which he founded). Kessler previously served as the national field director for the League of Conservation Voters and as a White House appointee managing conservation issues for President Bill Clinton.[33]
Bruce Boyd is a co-principal at Arabella. Previously Boyd worked for 13 years as a senior manager at the Nature Conservancy.[34] Boyd is an advisor to the New Venture Fund and the Hopewell Fund, and serves on the board of the Windward Fund.
Scott Nielsen is Arabella’s managing director of advocacy.[35] He also serves on the board of advisors at the Funders Committee For Civic Participation, a donors’ trade group which Arabella Advisors is a member of. Nielsen has also worked with the MacArthur Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Democracy Alliance, the State Infrastructure Fund, and the Open Society Foundations.[36]