George Soros, the left-wing billionaire known for his support of socialist and globalist causes, put millions of dollars behind a far-left money hub used by activists to push efforts aimed at dismantling the police.
A search of Soros’ Open Society Foundations’ grant database showed that the Foundation to Promote Open Society, a nonprofit within Soros’ network, gave $3 million to the Community Resource Hub for Safety and Accountability (CRH) in 2020.
CRH compiles resources for local leftist activists in order to help them make transformative change to the criminal-justice system. That includes materials on abolishing and defunding the police.
Out of the $3 million in Soros money, $2 million went to creating a “budgeting Academy program” to “train community safety advocates in how to advocate around their local municipal budgets,” according to grants. The remaining $1 million was used for general support.
In 2019, Soros’ nonprofit gave the resource center $1.9 million, out of which $500,000 was spent on establishing the hub, per tax forms.
Soros’ support of CRH is one of many ways the Hungarian-born investor has used his money to reshape local policing. For years, Soros has put money in district attorney races, typically supporting the most left-wing candidates. And his wide network of nonprofits has put hundreds of million of dollars toward causes such as “racial equality” and “criminal justice reform.”
CRH describes itself “as a resource for local advocates and organizers working to address the harms of policing in the U.S.” that seeks to “cultivate community safety and accountability outside of the criminal legal system.”
The center supports campaigns with technical assistance needs while providing research, reports, data, model policies, toolkits and “other resources to the field.”
Included in those materials is a 24-page CRH-authored memo that “reviews alternatives to policing in the context of police abolitionist frameworks, offering insights and sharing successful strategies for advocates in the field.”
That memo is just one of over 700 resources available on the site. CRH maintains that it does not necessarily endorse all materials in its hub.
The hub also features contributions from radical socialist groups such as No Cop Academy, Cops Off Campus Coalition, and The Digital Abolitionist, which are all categorized under the “abolitionist” tab.
The CRH website notes that the organization directly works on projects aimed at defunding police. For example, the hub “houses and staffs” the website defundpolice.org in partnership with several national movement organizations.
CRH hosts weekly two-hour “invest/divest learning communities” that are attended by 40 to 60 organizers throughout America, with a focus on “Budget Advocacy, Community-Based Safety Strategies, Police Fraternal Association Contracts, and Reparations for police violence.”
In addition, the hub hosts a Defund Police Fellowship that gives support to 16 fellows in 13 cities with money to support organizing staff. According to the CRH website, there are also “monthly trainings and skill building sessions, weekly office hours with budget, campaign strategy, and communications experts, and a peer mentor program.”
The Soros group’s tax forms show that CRH is a sponsored project of the New Venture Fund, a nonprofit incubator managed by the Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm Arabella Advisors.
The New Venture Fund gives the groups it houses its tax and legal status, meaning projects under its umbrella are not required to file IRS tax forms that would disclose information such as board members and financials.
Fox News notes:
The New Venture Fund raked in $965 million in anonymous donations in 2020, Fox News previously reported. It is one of four funds Arabella Advisors manages, along with the Sixteen Thirty Fund, Windward Fund and Hopewell Fund.
The four funds in the Arabella-managed dark money network pulled in a combined $1.6 billion in secret donations last year, tax forms show.
But while none of the funds disclose donors on their tax forms, Soros’ nonprofit outright states the cash is going to the New Venture Fund to be passed off to the CRH.
One of Soros’ longtime initiatives has been to elect progressive prosecutors in localities throughout the country.
“These are little-noticed offices; you don’t have to spend very much money to get elected to a prosecutors’ office,” Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, told Fox News.
“When you do, you have an enormous influence over who actually gets prosecuted and charged with crimes,” Lehman said. “You can rule out whole classes of crimes of meriting prosecution.”
Parker Thayer, who works as a researcher at the Capital Research Center, estimates that Soros has pumped $28 million into prosecutor races since 2015.
