Left-Wing Nonprofits Lose Massive Funding Partner

This summer, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation secretly began the process of withdrawing from its longstanding partnership with Arabella Advisors, a central hub of the Left’s dark money network.

This news, first reported by The New York Times, may seem irrelevant or esoteric, but it will likely send shockwaves through the political world.

The Gates Foundation isn’t just some billionaire’s side hustle—it’s the largest private foundation in the world. The foundation’s endowment stood at $77.2 billion at the end of last year, and it spent $102.3 billion since its inception, giving $8 billion in 2024 alone.

Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, has used the foundation to forward many of the left-leaning elites’ preferred causes, such as contraception, global development, vaccines, and more. While many of his causes align with the Left, he has not embraced an outwardly activist image like Hungarian American billionaire George Soros, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, or Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss.

The Gates Foundation’s divorce from Arabella doesn’t just represent a loss of cash, but a loss of respectability and clout, as Arabella draws more scrutiny as an engine of leftist political activism.

The Gates-Arabella Divorce

The Gates Foundation had given $450 million to Arabella-linked entities over the past 16 years, but on June 24, the foundation’s CEO Mark Suzman sent an internal memo announcing the foundation would halt new grants to the nonprofits Arabella works with, The New York Times’ Theodore Schleifer reported last week.

Other nonprofits are also seeking to distance themselves from Arabella in order to preserve ties with the Gates Foundation, sources told Schleifer.

The June 24 note doesn’t mention politics, instead emphasizing cutting out middlemen.

“Teams are increasingly working directly with programmatic partners—organizations that are deeply embedded in the communities we serve and closely aligned with our mission,” it reads. “As we look ahead, this is a chance to build deeper, more durable relationships with those partners—and to reinforce the kind of legacy we want to leave behind.”

While a source confirmed with Schleifer that the Gates Foundation has been pulling back from other intermediaries, Arabella has taken considerable heat in recent years.

Last year, Capital Research Center President Scott Walter published a book on Arabella Advisors, highlighting how the for-profit company helps left-leaning nonprofits promote climate alarmism, abortion, and other causes. The book’s cover features Bill Gates.

That research proved foundational to my own book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.” I testified before Congress alongside Walter on how Americans’ taxpayer dollars prop up leftist groups, including some nonprofits linked to Arabella.

This increased scrutiny—coupled with President Donald Trump’s orders cutting federal funding for climate alarmist causes; “diversity, equity, and inclusion” efforts; and gender ideology—may have combined to make Arabella too toxic for the Gates Foundation. Trump reportedly met with Gates in February and in August, but the White House declined to comment on whether the meetings had any impact on the foundation’s decision. The foundation did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.

What Is Arabella?

Arabella Advisors describes itself as a service provider, helping nonprofits pursue their missions. It supports independent nonprofit organizations that are tax exempt under Sections 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) of Internal Revenue Code, providing operational and administrative services such as compliance, accounting, human resources, and more.

Arabella Advisors provides these services to “seven sisters”: the New Venture Fund, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the Hopewell Fund, the Windward Fund, the North Fund, the Telescope Fund, and the Impetus Fund. From 2006 to 2023, these organizations generated combined revenues of $9.2 billion and expenditures of $7.8 billion, according to tax returns analyzed by the Capital Research Center.

Some of these nonprofits in turn act as “fiscal sponsors” for other projects.

This structure allows donors to give to an Arabella-linked nonprofit while cloaking which project their money supports.

The company also helps politically active nonprofits, like the 501(c)(4) Sixteen Thirty Fund, which contributes to political action committees. That nonprofit donated $97 million to super PACs seeking to elect Democrats or defeat Republicans since 2016, The New York Times reported.

Arabella Advisors had 425 employees as of 2023, according to an internal study.

A Messy Separation

Not only is the Gates Foundation blocking any new grants to Arabella-managed entities, but it has also begun to “pursue early exits” from ongoing grants, according to Schleifer.

Furthermore, Concentric Equity Partners, a private equity firm that acquired Arabella in 2020, removed Arabella from its public “investments” page earlier this year.

“We are proud of the work we’ve done and continue to do with the Gates Foundation and the impact we’ve helped support through their giving to the New Venture Fund,” an Arabella Advisors spokesperson told The Daily Signal. “Arabella Advisors provides operational support to hundreds of philanthropic clients pursuing social change. We do not have donors, make grants, or engage in political activity.”

What Does This Mean for the Left’s Dark Money Network?

It remains unclear just how much the Gates Foundation’s withdrawal will affect Arabella Advisors.

“Over the next five years, this decision will probably cost Arabella something close to $1 billion in revenues, at least on the nonprofit side,” the Capital Research Center’s investigative researcher Parker Thayer said in a recent podcast episode. He noted that most of the Gates Foundation’s contributions to the Arabella network were “nonpolitical.” He predicted that Arabella will survive the hit.

As I noted in my book, Arabella’s client nonprofits have contributed to many of the activist groups that staffed and advised the Biden administration.

The New Venture Fund, for example, gave:

• $20,000 in 2022 to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which pushed the demonization of conservatives in federal law enforcement under President Joe Biden.
• $50,000 in 2018 to the Human Rights Campaign, which pushed gender ideology in the Biden administration.
• $800,000 between 2010 and 2016 to the National Wildlife Federation, which pushed climate alarmism in the Biden administration.
• $2.97 million from 2012 to 2021 to the Center for American Progress, which pushed climate alarmism and open borders in the Biden administration.
• $120,000 from 2014 to 2017 to Demos, which pushed a federal takeover of elections under Biden.

The Sixteen Thirty Fund gave $3.6 million to the climate alarmist Sierra Club from 2014 to 2022 and another $300,00 to the Center for American Progress from 2014 to 2021.

The Gates Foundation’s withdrawal may not directly impact these grants or similar forms of political activism, but it does deal a heavy blow to the structure Arabella Advisors provides, which in turn will weaken the Left’s dark money network overall.