For more than 18 years, Arabella Advisors has served as a trusted advisor and service provider to many of the world’s most effective philanthropists, impact investors, and nonprofit organizations. Recently, a small group of politically conservative organizations have promoted false claims about Arabella Advisors and some of our clients. These claims turn on a variety of factual errors and deliberate mischaracterizations—some of which prompted the Washington Post’s Fact Checker column to write “we can only marvel at the hypocrisy of these attacks.” Here are the actual facts about us.
Arabella Advisors is a consulting business that supports philanthropy. At Arabella Advisors, our mission has always been to help our clients use philanthropic resources more effectively, efficiently, and equitably to accomplish their impact goals. We help our clients by sharing our expertise and experience, which includes providing outsourced operational support to nonprofit organizations. We do not pursue a particular ideology; we begin with the assumption that solutions to the challenges our society faces can come from concerned people with very different ideological and political viewpoints. We also do not determine how our clients use their resources; we work in response to client demand. We are a certified B Corporation, and we have been recognized by Ernst & Young, the Wall Street Journal, Worth magazine, and many others for our award-winning work and the company we have built.
We support our clients’ interests. We service hundreds of philanthropists and investors whose interests range from finding cures to diseases to supporting organizations rooted in their religious faith to addressing injustices through public education and policy change. While some of our clients’ interests are more visible than others, taken together they span the range of issues facing our country and the world. We are often unaware of our clients’ political perspectives, as politics often has no bearing on the work we do to support their philanthropy. At the same time, we are a certified B Corporation, which means we are a company with values. These include a commitment to strengthening our communities, working toward a more equitable future, protecting our planet, and defending democracy. We accept that, in the highly polarized world in which we currently live, some may see these values as inherently “political” or “partisan.” They are nevertheless our values, and we therefore endeavor to live them daily.
We are proud to count fiscal sponsors among our clients. Independent fiscal sponsor organizations come to Arabella for our best-in-class financial, operations, and compliance support. Despite periodic claims to the contrary, Arabella Advisors works for our fiscal sponsor clients, not the other way around. The nonprofits we work for make their own decisions on their strategies, programmatic work, and fundraising. We provide operational and administrative support and help ensure that their philanthropic efforts comply with IRS regulations and that grant dollars are used appropriately and well in pursuit of impact goals. Since the 1950s, fiscal sponsor organizations have provided operational homes to other, smaller nonprofit projects. This creates efficiency for the smaller projects and often makes philanthropy more effective by enabling more resources to reach the people and groups that need it most. Just like the diversity of Arabella’s clients, the projects hosted by the independent fiscal sponsor organizations we serve span a wide range of interests and ideological perspectives.
We respect donor and client privacy. Many of our clients are very public about their work, as is their prerogative. Others prefer to remain private or anonymous, as is also their prerogative—and often in keeping with the spirit of their giving. Just like an accounting firm or a law firm, we do not talk publicly about our clients unless they ask us to.
We will continue to do what we do—and do it well. Arabella Advisors is neither a funder nor a political organization. We are a company that aims to provide superlative support services and helpful advice to changemakers who are working to build a better future—one with healthy air, water, and food for all, with strong democracies and engaged citizens, with flourishing communities, expanded opportunity and enhanced equity, and without racism.
The work of the many changemakers we support—including nonprofit entrepreneurs, community leaders, advocates, and the funders who support them—is vastly larger and more important than the work of Arabella Advisors alone. We are inspired by their work and feel privileged to support it. We will therefore continue to do what we do with energy, passion, and conviction. The work of building a better future for all is far too important for us to do anything else.
June 27, 2023
