Leftist Donors Use Arabella Advisors to Finance Massive Gun Control Push

The following article is sponsored by Capital Research Center.

A massively funded strategy company that operates below the radar to push the interests of wealthy leftist donors quietly helps lead a funding nexus that advocates for gun control policies.

The secretive Arabella Advisors is a centralized hub that runs nonprofit arms that in turn have spawned a nexus of hundreds of front organizations outwardly designed to appear grassroots but actually working against ordinary people by expanding government control in the lives of Americans.

Arabella’s vast network was unmasked in an extensive exposé by conservative watchdog Capital Research Center, which documents the shadowy system developed by, housed in, and staffed by the for-profit, privately held Arabella Advisors.

The Arabella firm in turn manages four nonprofits: the New Venture Fund, Sixteen Thirty Fund, Windward Fund, and Hopewell Fund. These nonprofit entities play host to hundreds of groups and projects that promote interests and political movements strategically deployed in a long-term campaign to nudge the country to the left.

Capital Research’s Center’s report spotlights the Hope and Heal Fund, a donor collaborative based in California that itself serves as a central funding hub tied to scores of other donor groups that finance other groups that advocate federal gun control measures.

The Hope and Heal Fund is sponsored by Arabella’s New Venture Fund. It is led by Brian Malte, a longtime senior national policy director for the gun control advocacy group Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

The Hope and Heal Fund’s website lists 12 other “member” groups, most of which themselves fund large numbers of individual gun control organizations.

Hope and Heal’s funding collaborative members include:

• The Akonadi Foundation, whose website says the organization engages in “ecosystem grantmaking” that “recognize(s) how history and culture have allowed the privileges associated with ‘whiteness’ and the disadvantages associated with ‘color’ to endure, adapt, and accumulate over time.”
• The Heising-Simons Foundation, which finances scores of far-left organizations.
• The Weingart Foundation, which boasts it works to “provide unrestricted funding to organizations advancing racial, social and economic equity.”
• The California Wellness Foundation, which has awarded over $1 billion in grants since 1992 and focuses in part on “gun violence prevention.”

Hope and Heal Fund itself was launched in October 2017 with $2 million from eight far-left funding groups, including the Akonadi Foundation, the California Endowment, Blue Shield of California Foundation, and California Wellness Foundation, Capital Research’s report documents.

The report also reveals that, besides gun control advocacy, Arabella Advisors has been quietly behind a hydra-like dark money network of pop-up groups designed to look like grassroots activist organizations. These front groups push everything from opposition to President Trump’s proposed border wall to support for Obamacare to gun control to government control of the Internet to pro-abortion activism and other left-wing causes.

Arabella’s nonprofits raised a combined $1.6 billion from 2013-2017 with the aim of advancing “the political policies desired by wealthy left-wing interests through hundreds of ‘front’ groups,” according to the report. “And those interests pay well: the network’s revenues grew by an incredible 392 percent over that same period.”

“Together, these groups form an interlocking network of ‘dark money’ pop-up groups and other fiscally sponsored projects, all afloat in a half-billion-dollar ocean of cash,” states the report. “The real puppeteer, though, is Arabella Advisors, which has managed to largely conceal its role in coordinating so much of the professional Left’s infrastructure under a mask of ‘philanthropy.’”

Read the full Arabella report here.