The Hopewell Fund is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization managed by Arabella Advisors, a for-profit consulting company that advises left-leaning donors and nonprofits about where to give money and serves as the hub of a politically liberal "dark money" network in the United States.[1] The Hopewell Fund serves as the fiscal sponsor for various left-leaning political projects.[2] The Hopewell Fund spent over $127 million in 2020, and is one of the five largest nonprofits associated with the Democratic Party.[3]
| Formation | 2015 |
|---|---|
| Type | 501(c)(3) nonprofit |
| Headquarters | Washington, D.C. |
| Affiliations | Arabella Advisors Sixteen Thirty Fund New Venture Fund Windward Fund North Fund |
Budget (2020) | $152,371,332 (revenue) |
| Website | www |
Eric Kessler is the fund's founding president and board chair, serving until May 2016. Lee Bodner has been board chair and president ever since, as of 2021.[4]
The Hopewell Fund incubated States Newsroom and registered to use the names of multiple outlets affiliated with the States Newsroom as its own legal aliases.[5] According to OpenSecrets, "The Hopewell Fund gave $1.72 million to an organization called News for Democracy that was at the crux of a network of seemingly independent Facebook pages disguised as news outlets that started spending on digital ads in 2018." In 2020, OpenSecrets described these types of activities as "some of the biggest coordinated efforts using pseudo news for political gain discovered to date."[6]
A 2022 analysis by The New York Times found that the Hopewell Fund "gave $8.1 million to a dark-money group called Acronym, which spent millions of dollars on Facebook advertising and backed a company called Courier Newsroom that published articles favoring Democrats and received millions of dollars from dark money groups."[3] The Hopewell Fund sponsored Democracy Docket, a liberal-leaning voting rights and media platform founded by lawyer Marc Elias.[3]
Financial backers of the Hopewell Fund include Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Iranian-American billionaire and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros.[6][3]
References
edit- ^ Moskovitz, Diana (1 December 2017). "What The Hell Is The Hopewell Fund?". Deadspin. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
- ^ "The Inside Philanthropy Power List". Inside Philanthropy. 21 July 2021. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
- ^ a b c d Vogel, Kenneth P.; Goldmacher, Shane (29 January 2022). "Democrats Decried Dark Money. Then They Won With It in 2020". The New York Times. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
- ^ "Hopewell Fund (2015 Form 990)". ProPublica. 2013-05-09. Retrieved 2023-10-04.
- ^ Scire, Sarah (March 8, 2023). "Pew's Stateline finds a new home with nonprofit States Newsroom". Nieman Lab. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
- ^ a b Massoglia, Anna (22 May 2020). "'Dark money' networks hide political agendas behind fake news sites". OpenSecrets News. Retrieved 11 September 2023.
External links
edit"Hopewell Fund Internal Revenue Service filings". ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer.