The new leader of a liberal dark money pop-up group that plans to spend millions combating conservative efforts to push back against critical race theory in K-12 schools has frequently called for defunding the police.
Heather Harding announced Monday that she was appointed as executive director of the Campaign for Our Shared Future, a group that, despite being founded in May, claims to have already raised $9 million and has ambitious plans to organize efforts in 15 states to reverse anti-critical race theory policies in the 2022 and 2024 elections. Among the states targeted by the group include Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Harding, who previously worked for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, deleted over 2,500 tweets from her personal account in the week before she announced she would be taking the helm at Campaign for Our Shared Future, Fox News reported. But numerous tweets in which she railed against law enforcement survived the purge.
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“Defund the police. Fund schools,” Harding tweeted on May 31, 2020, less than a week after George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis.
“Stop calling them law enforcement—they haven’t followed a damn law yet! #Stopkillingus #Defundthepolice,” Harding wrote in a June 5, 2020, tweet.
Campaign for Our Shared Future positions itself as a “non-partisan effort to support high quality K-12 education.”
“The Campaign for Our Shared Future fights for equitable, anti-racist programs, practices, and policies that sustain schools and ensure opportunity for every child and a brighter future for us all,” the group states on its website.
Campaign for Our Shared Future is just one of the dozens of pop-up groups managed by the New Venture Fund, which is an arm of the liberal Arabella Advisors dark money network.
Arabella Advisors manages the largest liberal dark money network in the country. Its groups raised $1.6 billion from undisclosed donors in 2020 alone, and in turn, doled out nearly $900 million in grants to liberal groups across the country, Fox News reported.
Structured as 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) nonprofit organizations, the dozens of groups within the Arabella Advisors network are not required to disclose the identities of their donors publicly.
Harding declined to reveal her organization’s funding sources in an interview with Politico on Monday.
“We’re fully independent,” Harding told the outlet. “But at this time, to be honest with you, the way that literal white supremacists are showing up, threatening educators and families, we don’t want to put a target on the back of any of our donors.”
Harding said Campaign for Our Shared Future would look into any legislation that “gets in the way of students getting what they need to learn and thrive and be successful.”
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“It’s clear to me that the battle continues to grow,” Harding told Politico. “We think that presidential politics will continue to keep schools sort of in their crosshairs. We don’t find that productive to the actual work of learning, so we do hope that as more donors join us, we can be broader and go deeper so that public schools continue to be a backbone of democracy.”
