New Venture Fund

The New Venture Fund is the 501(c)(3) charitable arm of the Arabella Advisors network, serving as one of the largest fiscal sponsors in American philanthropy. With annual revenues exceeding $900 million in recent years, the New Venture Fund is larger than most major national nonprofits, yet it maintains an almost invisible public profile. The organization functions as an incubator and fiscal sponsor for hundreds of progressive projects — providing them with tax-exempt status, payroll services, grant management, and administrative support without requiring them to incorporate independently. This means that what appears to be a diverse ecosystem of independent progressive organizations — groups focused on climate change, voting rights, immigration reform, healthcare access, racial justice, and education — are actually projects housed under the New Venture Fund's single tax-exempt umbrella. The funding mechanism relies on the opacity inherent in fiscal sponsorship: major foundations and individual donors contribute to the New Venture Fund, which allocates the money to its housed projects. Because the projects have no independent legal existence, they file no separate tax returns and there is no public record of how much money each project receives or spends. The New Venture Fund has housed prominent projects including the Hopewell Fund (health advocacy), Fix the Court (judicial transparency — ironically housed by a dark money group), and numerous election-cycle pop-up campaigns. Many of these projects exist for a single issue campaign or election cycle before being dissolved, leaving no organizational footprint. Tax filings analyzed by Capital Research Center and Politico reveal that the New Venture Fund has received grants from some of America's largest foundations — including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, and the Packard Foundation — as well as from government agencies and corporate philanthropies. The fund's rapid growth from under $100 million in 2015 to nearly $1 billion by 2020 reflects the explosion of progressive dark money infrastructure that has paralleled (and in some years exceeded) conservative dark money spending.