The Student Experience Research Network seems innocuous enough. The organization says it exists to “advance the research, relationships and capacity needed to build an educational system in which each student experiences respect as a valued person and thinker.”
The group actually funds research aimed at promoting DEI practices in education and partners with other left-wing organizations to promote “inclusive mathematical environments“and boost universities abandon standardized tests. Earlier this month, the Student Experience Research Network took a victory lap after the University of California system said it would roll out the SAT in its admissions process.
The Student Experience Research Network and hundreds of other left-wing activist groups like it are controlled from top to bottom by Arabella Advisors, a for-profit consultancy that plays an integral role in Democratic causes, fueled by donations from billionaires like George Soros and Pierre. to skip The company, which doles out billions to Democratic pet projects, has established five tax-exempt nonprofit groups that pay Arabella a hefty fee, ostensibly for administrative work, and in turn operate a wide variety of of left-wing advocacy groups, including Student Experience. Research network.
In fact, the ostensible employees of the Student Experience Research Network don’t even work there. They are employees of a branch of Arabella, the New Venture Fund. The average citizen would have no idea who is pulling the strings.
This is the first of two reports based on internal Arabella documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. They offer a rare window into the inner workings of the Left’s dark money network, revealing the extent to which a wide swath of activist organizations are centrally controlled by a central clearinghouse based in the nation’s capital. as well as how far Arabella’s leaders go. they disguise this control and create the illusion of grassroots political activism.
This is not the type of relationship that Arabella and two of its spinoffs, New Venture Fund and Sixteen Thirty Fund, described to the IRS when they sought tax-exempt status.
The agency challenged New Venture Fund when it first applied for such status in 2006, over its apparent conflicts of interest with Arabella. At the time, Arabella’s founder and sole owner, Eric Kessler, served as chairman and president of the New Venture Fund, and the New Venture Fund proposed to pay Arabella a 5% overhead fee to handle administrative duties. Arabella’s current ownership is unclear: It is owned by a Delaware company called Arabella Acquisition, LLC, which does not disclose its ownership.
The IRS was concerned that New Venture Fund was not seeking competing bids for the contract and that Kessler was making illegal profits from his own charity. But the feds eventually relented, granting the fund nonprofit status after Kessler claimed New Venture Fund’s contract with Arabella would last only one year, or until New Venture Fund could run its own human resources department .
“Advisors provide administrative and management support services until the organization has sufficient financial resources to make its own back office operation profitable,” New Venture Fund told the IRS. “Furthermore, the Agreement is intended to be temporary and indeed only lasts for one year. As soon after that period as the Organization has adequate funding, it would no longer require the services of the advisers.”
Suffice it to say that the services are still flowing. What is true for the Student Experience Research Network is also true for hundreds of other activist groups, including Stop Deficit Squawks, Americans for Tax Fairness, the Institute for Responsive Government, Defend American Democracy, Fix our Senate , the Voter Engagement Fund, the Scholarly. Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition and hundreds of other groups – are controlled by the Democratic elites who work for Arabella Advisors.
“If the New Venture Fund intended its arrangement with Arabella Advisors to be only temporary when seeking tax relief, why has this arrangement continued for nearly two decades?” said Americans for Public Trust Executive Director Caitlin Sutherland. “For Arabella to collect more than $200 million in fees for a ‘temporary’ settlement requires a second look from the IRS.”
The five Arabella funds serve as fiscal sponsors of the network’s emerging groups, organizations that exist for a short period and then dissolve, often rallying support or opposition to a particular political goal. Fiscal sponsorship is a unique arrangement that allows initiatives to operate as non-profit entities without disclosing their board members and obfuscating the sources of their income, expenses or who they distribute grants to. From protest movements to lobbying, if there’s a new liberal cause, there’s usually an Arabella group to champion it.
Some of Arabella’s most prominent emerging groups, such as Demand Justice, eventually break away from the network and establish themselves as independent nonprofits. Others, such as Kansans for safe elections, SoCal Healthcare Coalitioni March of Justice exist for a short period and then dissolve.
Former Arabella CEO Sampriti Ganguly has described the company as a humble company that provides human resources, accounting and legal guidance to clients. However, that of New Venture Fund employee handbookobtained by free lighthousepaints a different picture of centralized control.
It reveals that Arabella controls New Venture Fund and its various emerging groups with management teams of Arabella employees.
“NVF’s board of directors has engaged Arabella Advisors, to provide staffing and management services,” the handbook states. “Arabella Advisors provides support to NVF projects through dedicated oversight by a Managing Director (MD), an Account Manager (AM), accounting and financial services and HR support.”
The account manager serves as the “first point of contact at NVF for all project-related transactions and inquiries,” according to the manual. In some cases, the manager has a team of Arabella employees to assist him in the operations of an emerging group.
These teams, including the manager, are considered contractors. Therefore, they are hidden from IRS disclosure forms and are not listed as staff members of New Venture Fund or its emerging groups.
New Venture Fund emerging groups do not operate within the typical nonprofit parameters outlined by federal law. They are effectively departments of the New Venture Fund and each of their employees is on the fund’s payroll. That means a group like the Student Experience Research Network or the Institute for Responsive Government it does not have its own employees, but rather employees of the New Venture Fund under the guise of the Institute for Responsible Government. The same goes for the Compassion projectthe Alaska Venture Fundthe Healthy Voting Projectand countless other New Venture Fund “pop-up” groups.
The IRS does not require New Venture Fund to report how many startup groups operate under its wing, let alone the names of the groups or how many of its employees work on each initiative. The fund employed 986 people in 2021, according to its tax return that year
And staff at the New Venture Fund’s emerging groups are prohibited from discussing their ties to the broader network, according to the fund’s employee handbook, which, according to the document’s metadata, was prepared in April 2019 by senior director of Arabella Gideon Steinberg.
“In general, only personnel with designated authority may represent NVF or its projects externally,” the manual states. “NVF staff should always clearly state the project they are representing and not imply that they are representing all of NVF unless explicitly authorized to do so.”
New Venture Fund does not hide the ball from its employees. The handbook refers to itself as well as the other funds in the network (the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the Hopewell Fund and the Windward Fund) as “managed organizations”, each of which is overseen by a team of Arabella staff .
The advantages of Arabella’s centralized control over the network are clear to New Venture Fund employees. With Arabella at the helm, she can “coordinate collaborative initiatives among donors” and access “expert philanthropic strategy assessment, execution and development support services.”
In practice, that means Arabella can shuffle a lot of money between its funds, and it does: The network’s five funds passed a combined $189 million between them over those two years, according to their tax returns.
Arabella’s funds raised a total of $3.3 billion in 2020 and 2021. Her main political arm, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, distributed $61 million to Democratic Super PACs during the 2020 election cycle, second only to Majority Forward, a dark money group associated with Senate Democrats. The Sixteen Thirty Fund spent as much on politics in 2020 as the Federal Election Commission’s general counsel he urged commission in June 2022 to “find reason to believe” that the fund violated federal law by failing to register as a political committee. The FEC, however, went against his lawyer’s recommendation and Closed the case in September.
More than a decade after the New Venture Fund and the Sixteen Thirty Fund filed for nonprofit status, Arabella still controls the funds. His management fee for some of them has increased to 15 percent. New venture fund completed in 2021 with assets exceeding $1.2 billion and funneled nearly $30 million in service fees to Arabella. The Sixteen Thirty Fund, which ended in 2021 with more than 97 million dollars in the bank, he paid Arabella more than 5 million dollars in the same year.
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