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As the country barrels through a bitter election season, a major philanthropist working toward bipartisan solutions says division in America is not as bad as it might seem.
“Despite the optics — which I grant you are not good — there is a lot of great work that is still happening and that could happen,” Laura Arnold, co-founder and co-chair of Arnold Ventures, said in an interview with Chronicle of Philanthropy CEO Stacy Palmer. “And that’s what gives me a lot of hope.”
Arnold said people are coalescing around important issues, including matters relating to health care, taxation, criminal justice, public finance, and democracy. “There is a lot of consensus.”
Arnold joined Palmer to launch The Commons in Conversation, a LinkedIn interview series that’s part of The Commons, the Chronicle project exploring how philanthropy and nonprofits are working to close divides, repair the social fabric, and strengthen communities.
Arnold and her husband, John, are members of the Giving Pledge and regulars on the Chronicle’s annual list of the biggest philanthropists in America. Prior to launching Arnold Ventures, the couple’s philanthropy, Laura was executive vice president and general counsel for a global oil-exploration company based in Houston. She is a founding partner of the REFORM Alliance, a national criminal-justice advocacy organization.
In the interview, Arnold talked about how their philanthropy aims to bring people together on seemingly opposing sides on issues such as criminal justice. Research and evidence are key, she said. “In terms of building bridges, when you present someone with a body of facts, even if it’s something very controversial, that is a steppingstone to a conversation that is more likely to be productive, in our experience.”
Arnold said it’s also critical to push ideology to the side. “It’s very hard to resist the temptation to be righteous,” she said. “Sometimes, you feel so deeply about some issues that you can’t possibly see that somebody could think differently than you.”
But she cautioned that if you don’t make space for and respect other points of view, “you will lose the fight right then.”
The conversation took place on LinkedIn. You also can watch a recording of the interview on the Chronicle’s YouTube channel. Below is a transcript of the conversation lightly edited for clarity.
Bipartisan Solutions for Tough Problems
Stacy Palmer: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to The Commons in Conversation, a new series the Chronicle is launching as part of our work to put the focus on the ways nonprofits and philanthropy can close the nation’s many divides, not just politics, but race, gender, geography, generation, and so much more.
When we were designing these conversations, we knew we wanted to start it off with a philanthropist who has been successful in advancing bipartisan solutions to policy, and that’s no easy feat. That’s even more necessary today when we have the 50/50 divide we’re likely to see in this fall’s elections. The work of Arnold Ventures immediately came to mind, and we’re so pleased that Laura Arnold is able to join us today. Laura, welcome to this conversation.
Laura Arnold: Stacy, thank you so much for having me and, more importantly, for starting this space of The Commons and encouraging others to think about these issues of how we can create a better society for all of us and how to decrease polarization and make the country better. I’m honored to be part of that conversation, and of course, I’m thrilled and honored to be here with you.
Palmer: A lot of people in philanthropy know the Arnolds well. Let me just remind you about their giving. They are among the nation’s most generous philanthropists. They have signed the Giving Pledge. They’ve also committed to give at least 5 percent of their wealth away every year, really focusing on the giving-while-living philosophy. That means that they’re doing a lot of work in many, many areas of interest to our audience. They focus on education, infrastructure — so many different things — and we’ll talk about many of those different things today.
Laura, I’m curious as we look at the way things have changed since you got into philanthropy. I think you’ve been working seriously at it for about 14 years. Can you talk a little bit about how you see the issue of the nation’s divide changing? How has it affected you as a philanthropist in the work that you’re trying to get done? Is it indeed intensifying, and does dealing with this issue have to become a necessary preoccupation for everyone in philanthropy?
Arnold: Well, thank you for that question. We’ve been engaged in philanthropy in some way, shape, or form for many years. Arnold Ventures now and for the last 10-plus years has really been a policy organization, meaning that our objective is to help people through better laws. The trajectory of change, for us, is identifying a problem, creating better alternatives that are evidence-based to solve that problem, scaling solutions where appropriate, testing them, and when solutions are proven, transforming them into policy. Necessarily, a political environment that is “polarized” informs that trajectory of change, and it affects behavior in some ways. There is the policy world, I would say, and then there is also the philanthropy world.
I’ll start with the philanthropy world. For me, the greatest takeaway in the last 10 years or so is that the space in philanthropy, on one hand, has become much more data driven because many more actors are entering that are focused on data. There are many young people who have found success early on in life, people who are much more focused on numbers and deliverables, etc. From that perspective, the evidence piece has been really terrific.
Overlaid with that have been the very difficult reckonings that we’ve had as a society, as a country, in the last 10 years, particularly since the murder of George Floyd, the real angst that we as a society rightly feel for the civil-rights violations that were highlighted in the course of those discussions, coupled with the Covid pandemic and all of the ensuing injustices that we saw.
Despite the optics — which I grant you are not good — there is a lot of great work that is still happening and that could happen, and that’s what gives me a lot of hope.
A social scientist whose name escapes me would always say that pandemics fracture societies along known fault lines. When the pandemic occurred, all those fault lines further fractured society and exposed to all of us injustices that had been in the background, had always existed that hadn’t been top of mind.
What that meant for philanthropy is that a lot of well-intentioned, significant giving entered the space in an effort to remedy that problem. Now, those of us who work in philanthropy know that nothing changes in a day or a year or five years. It’s hard work, but the infusion of that capital I do think somehow changed the narrative in some instances. That spirit was co-opted into ideological warfare. That was an unfortunate and unintended consequence of what we will broadly call polarization in the last 10 years.
On the philanthropy side, that’s what I see — a struggle because ideology has suddenly become, to some, extremely prominent. We’re in an election year where a lot of philanthropic capital is driven by ideology. It’s not pejorative to say that it’s ideology, because as philanthropists, you give your money to what you believe in. But it’s not dispassionate. It’s quite passionate. That’s another way of giving, and I’m not criticizing it, but it’s very different from how we operate. That’s on the philanthropy side.
On the policymaking side, the point that I will make is that there is no dearth of examples of polarization leading to dysfunction in legislation. We could just fire them off in terms of even recent history, the last two to six months. We’re all collectively very frustrated at the lack of collaboration between parties.
That is true, but it is also true — and we very deeply believe at Arnold Ventures and have experienced it to be true — that there are areas even at the federal level and certainly at the state level where people coalesce around issues that are important, that are of immediate salience to communities and that people want to change today. Those issues relate to health care, to taxation, to criminal justice, to public finance, to democracy. There are a lot of consensuses even at the federal level on health care, on pharmaceuticals, on prison reform. We’ve seen it in many areas where — despite the optics, which I grant you are not good — there is a lot of great work that is still happening and that could happen, and that’s what gives me a lot of hope.
Palmer: I’d like to talk about some of the progress that you are making in some of these areas. Given that it’s election season, let me pick an example of a solution that Arnold Ventures is trying to advance with the idea that it leads to bipartisanship and brings everyone together and everyone into the process.
One of the ideas that you’ve been advocating is called ranked-choice voting. Could you explain what that is and talk about why that’s an antidote to some of the polarization that we see?
Arnold: Absolutely. I’ll say that ranked-choice voting is part of our democracy portfolio. The objective of that portfolio is not unlike many of our portfolios, which is to create systemic change in an area where we believe there is a market imbalance and suboptimal outcomes for society.
In structural democratic reform, which is where we were, we see that broadly defined, the people who are elected do not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of the people that they are representing, so there is a disconnect between the sentiment and views of the general population or even the district that this person is representing and the actions of that person in his or her elected role.
Piece one of the solution is to open the primary system so that we can break this logjam of hyperpartisan primaries.
There are lots of different reasons why one might believe that it [the disconnect] exists. Our belief is that a very significant reason for that misalignment is our partisan primary system. We have partisan primaries in most states. The game is won and lost in the primaries.
The Texas Tribune here in my home state of Texas very famously reported not too long ago that something like 3 percent of Texans decide the electoral outcomes for the rest of the state. And that’s because those are the people who show up in primaries. Most races are not competitive when you get to the Democrats versus the Republicans because the districts are such that gerrymandering may be a reason. But for whatever reason, as the districts are, they are not competitive.
The competitive piece is the primary. Winning the primary means you won the race. If such a small number of people are determining the outcome, those people almost by definition are not representative of the collective body of humans who are being represented by this person, and that is a disconnect.
Our solution to this is to open the primaries — not to have partisan primaries but have one primary in which the top four or five people make it to the general election whether they’re Republicans, Democrats, independents, libertarians — whatever they are. Piece one of the solution is to open the primary system so that we can break this logjam of hyperpartisan primaries that are then determining the district.
Part two of our proposed solution is, as you noted, ranked-choice voting. Once you get to the election, you don’t just vote for one person; you rank your first choice, your second choice, your third choice — however many you’d like.
In terms of process, what happens is, the votes are tallied. If someone gets 51 percent of the vote, great, that person won. If a candidate does not get 51 percent of the vote, then your vote, Stacy, if you voted for a number one, a number two, and a number three and your “number one” didn’t win, then your vote doesn’t get cast away. What happens is your number two choice becomes your number one choice, and the election gets run again until someone gets 51 percent of the votes and wins.
What that does in practice is signal to the candidates that I don’t need to only cater to the people who are my people. I need to cater to a much broader set of individuals because I want to be someone’s number two, and I want to be someone’s number three choice. I don’t want to just be the number one choice of a tiny amount of people; I want to be those people’s number one choice, but I also want to be a lot of people’s number two and three choices.
When you do that, when you start looking with interest to a voter who is a little bit outside of your very narrow comfort zone ideologically or politically, then you change as a candidate because you become more centrist. You then become more reflective of the people that you would ultimately be serving. That is the hope.
You saw this in practice very clearly in the now not-so-recent but not-ancient election for New York City mayor [in 2021] when ranked-choice voting was implemented and you saw candidates saying, “Vote for me, but if you don’t want to vote for me, vote for Stacy. To be totally clear, I want you to vote for me, but if you hate me, please vote for Stacy because she is the next best thing.” Stacy is saying the same thing: “Vote for me, but if you don’t vote for me, vote for my number two.” That shows you that you’re able to cater to a different type of voter, and you become a different type of candidate.
When you anchor the work on facts, you have a very different conversation than if you walk into the room with a legislature and start preaching to them about your beliefs.
That’s what we are testing. We’re very optimistic about the intervention. This is in place now in Alaska. We’re defending it. There are ballot initiatives in Oregon, Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, and South Dakota. There are a lot of places where this is active and where there is great interest and momentum because people understand that this disconnect doesn’t help democracy. It’s not about helping Republicans, Democrats, or independents. It’s simply about closing the gap of the disconnect between how a legislator acts and how her constituents feel.
Palmer: It’s such a good example of all the ingredients that need to go into some of the fixes that will make people want to engage in voting and, indeed, participate. Could you zoom out and talk about what are, if philanthropists are trying to advance bipartisan solutions, two or three key ingredients that you would recommend that they keep in mind?
Arnold: I think by far for us, in our experience, the two most significant ingredients or factors that have allowed us to advance projects have been, first, to focus on evidence and, second, a lack of ideology. By that, I don’t mean a lack of passion. I mean a lack of ideology, a lack of righteousness.
The first component, the evidence piece: The first question we ask ourselves once we’ve identified a problem is, “What do we know? What do we know works and what do we know doesn’t? Are there really smart people in the field who have ideas that they would like to test that they haven’t been able to test because they haven’t had the opportunity, the resources, the political backing, or whatever else?”
Let’s get our heads around what we know and what we don’t know, which is even more important than what we do know, because a lot of times we don’t know and need to run tests. Let’s create a theory of change of things that we should test that we can then scale that can then translate into policy change.
When you center the work and anchor it on facts, you have a very different conversation than if you walk into the room with a legislature and start preaching to them about your beliefs. Not that those beliefs are not important; they are important because you’re a human being and entitled to your beliefs, and if you’re a philanthropist and want to invest in those beliefs, I get that. But I think in terms of building bridges, when you present someone with a body of facts, even if it’s something very controversial, that is a steppingstone to a conversation that is more likely to be productive, in our experience. A focus on evidence for us is really critical.
If you’re in the business of bipartisanship and collaboration, you have to mean it. That means that you have to sit with people who don’t think like you, and you have to be O.K. with that.
The other piece that I mentioned is a dispassionate approach that lacks ideology. That’s very important to the fabric of Arnold Ventures. It is very hard to resist the temptation to be righteous sometimes, because sometimes you feel so deeply about some issues that you can’t possibly conceive that somebody could think differently than you. But in fact, the world is a big place, the country is a big place, and there are a lot of people in this country. And they do think differently than you because they have different experiences than you, and because they have a different vantage point than you, and because they have different lives than you. And if you don’t make space to respect those points of view, and if you label those points of view in a ways that’s pejorative, you will lose the fight right then.
There is a strategy that some pursue, and which I respect, which is burning bridges. You call people who they are, you protest and make your voice heard. I get that. I’m a fiery Latin. I’m Puerto Rican. But that is not how we work. It has to be very deliberate for us. If you’re in the business of bipartisanship and collaboration, you have to mean it. That means that you have to sit with people who don’t think like you, and you have to be O.K. with that. You have to understand that that’s how things happen. Things may not happen in exactly the way that you would want because if everyone were like us, the world would be oh so perfect! They’re not, and we’re not! We’re imperfect, too. This is all an exercise in humility and compassion and getting to where we can get to, considering what we all care about.
Palmer: I think those are terrific lessons for all of our audience. Everyone is incredibly appreciative of all the research that Arnold Ventures has funded. As you have often noted, there is not a lot of good research on many of the topics about which we think we know something, and at least starting that basis off of knowing things is helpful.
This probably plays into something. We asked our audience what they would like to hear from you. Someone wrote in and said, “I would love to hear Laura discuss some of the incredible impact that Arnold Ventures has had on the criminal-justice system and how criminal justice plays out in political partisanship based on the research.” Would you like to spend a few minutes on criminal justice as an example of what you were talking about when we discussed research? That’s another hot-button issue that people disagree on in many cases, and yet you’ve been able to bring about a great deal of progress.
There are prisons in this country that work extremely well and better than others. There are singular actors who are actually quite good, but no one is going to say “bravo” to the system that we have — no one!
Arnold: I very much appreciate both the compliment and certainly the question. Thank you for the opportunity to talk about this portfolio. Criminal justice is one of our oldest portfolios. It’s hard to believe, but when we entered the space, really there were very few philanthropists in criminal justice. There was a very active juvenile-justice space. Juveniles, for justifiable reasons, had a greater degree of attention. It’s a different environment, if you will.
When we entered this space, it is not much of an exaggeration to say that the general population mostly believed that if you were in prison, you did something bad and that’s where you belong. There wasn’t a collective discourse about the system. There just wasn’t. There were many dedicated, humble, incredible people trying to reform the system. It was like Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who; they were screaming and screaming, but there wasn’t a lot of philanthropic attention and therefore policy attention.
A couple things happened that worked in our favor. We entered the space, and very quickly — and not by virtue of anything grand or great that we did, but by virtue of the dearth of the space — we became the largest funder of criminal justice overnight. It wasn’t a hard obstacle because there weren’t that many people in that space.
When we started looking at the space, we realized that there is so much brokenness in all these systems. Sometimes you’re playing Whac-A-Mole; many things pop up, and everything is broken. Nobody in criminal justice will say, “This one thing works perfectly.” There are prisons in this country that work extremely well and better than others. There are singular actors who are actually quite good, but no one is going to say “bravo” to the system that we have — no one!
Everything is bad, and by the way, it doesn’t relate only to the carceral system but to everything. It relates to society. It relates to circumstances that we create that create a pipeline to prison. It relates to how we treat people once they exit prison. It’s a whole thing.
This is all to say that when we started, there was much less consciousness of all of that, not to mention the issues regarding policing. We started our work in criminal justice with a very simple observation. We looked at the pretrial system, and we saw that in most jurisdictions, when you get arrested for whatever, shoplifting, DUI, or whatever else, you go before a judge and that judge generally at the time will just look at a fixed bail schedule. For example, “Stacy Palmer, first offense. Bail is set at $500. Today is September 4, I’ll see you April 26 for your trial.”
What happens to Stacy between September 4 and April 26? Well, that depends on one thing only: Does Stacy have $500 for bail? If Stacy has $500 or she has $50 to pay 10 percent to a bail bondsman, she goes home and may or may not appear on April 26. If Stacy doesn’t have $500, she stays in jail. She stays in jail, incarcerated until her trial even though we live in a system where you are innocent until proven guilty allegedly.
That seemed really stupid to us for a lot of reasons. It’s expensive, and the thing that you should care about when Stacy is in front of that judge, the only thing that you should care about is: Will Stacy show up in court in April, or will she flee? Second, is she violent? Will she do something bad to someone if she’s released? A fixed bail schedule answers neither of those questions because organized crime pays money right away and the person walks. Whereas someone who shoplifted from Target because she has to feed her two kids, that doesn’t answer any questions.
This started our interest in creating a more data-centric system to create a better outcome. That coincided with a lot of budget crises in state governments where people were asking, “Why are we spending all this money incarcerating people? Do they really need to be there in the first place?” That was our first foray into criminal-justice reform, having conversation about who needs to be in prison, who needs to be in jail, and under what circumstances.
What we’ve learned in the many years since then is that that initial carceral event has highly detrimental consequences for the individual’s entire life. If we can delay that moment of incarceration, that’s good for society. It saves society money. It doesn’t destroy lives. It creates better outcomes for communities.
If you are in this work because you want to help people, then you need to be invested in knowing what does and does not work, because otherwise you’re doing something but you’re not helping people.
In terms of our criminal-justice work, what we’re focused now on — and what we learned from that experience — is that the focus of our criminal-justice work — and of the system — needs to be to create an environment where there are consequences for bad actions, where we are serving people who need assistance. And very frequently a carceral environment is not the solution and, in fact, exacerbates the problem. And we do that in a way that is respectful of civil rights and public safety.
How can we create a system that balances those things? Public safety, civil rights, what’s right for society, public accountability? That’s the body of our research, and that’s what we’re thinking about all the time. What interventions create better outcomes for people? What police training creates better outcomes so that we have fewer incidents of abuse? What kinds of interventions in prisons create better outcomes both for prisoners and for guards? What creates a higher likelihood of success? That’s what we care about as a society; having successful people come out of the carceral system not broken but in a position to be productive members of society.
There are lots of tentacles to the criminal-justice work that are research focused that we’ve really gotten deep on. Community corrections is another one that is highly bipartisan, highly impactful. Something like 4 million people are under community supervision in this country through probation and parole. The conditions are onerous and often nonsensical. There are a ton of bipartisan opportunities to change that, to help people become agents of change, to help people develop better lives as opposed to crushing them and creating worse outcomes for everyone.
Palmer: I like how focused you are on the goals that you have. And they are audacious and ones that you will need to keep at for a long time. That’s the other part of how you’ve described this work; there are no short-term fixes, and that is what philanthropy is here for.
We talked a little bit about how these divides in society are changing how philanthropy works and what is possible. When you look forward, are you seeing changes that you think more people will come together on bipartisan solutions in the world of philanthropy?And are there philanthropists that you’re looking at that you’re excited to see the kind of work that they are doing?
Arnold: I think there are a lot of people who are extraordinarily passionate about things they do. I think, from a topical perspective, we have great collaborations and are very attuned to many philanthropists who share our values on things like infrastructure and energy, which we didn’t talk too much about — certainly democracy, journalism, criminal justice, etc. I think there is a lot of momentum and a heightened awareness of evidence.
The challenge is to develop a consensus of what evidence means. You know probably more than anybody because of your role that every nonprofit that you will ever see will show you a graph that has a hockey stick. That’s not evidence. That’s not science.
By the way, those people who came before you, they’re amazing people. They’re wonderful people. They’ve devoted their lives to this thing that they deeply believe in, and they’ve got tons of anecdotal evidence as to why this is the thing to do. But if there is no science, there is no science. I personally don’t have a problem with funding something where there is no science if you say, “This is an experiment. There is no science. We’re going to test it.” That’s a perfectly acceptable, admirable, great thing to do.
Where we get into problems as philanthropists is when we’re calling evidence something that is not evidence. It’s not a popular stance to take, as we do at Arnold Ventures, when we tell someone who is a wonderful, kind, amazing person that their thing is unproven. Frequently, what we’re saying is that we have no idea if something is going to work, and we would like to test it. Having that discipline is my aspiration for the next stage of collaboration in philanthropy as we tackle some of these issues that are important.
Every program that we implement from a policy level that we don’t test is a missed opportunity, because these problems are going to come back. If we spend massive amounts of federal resources and don’t learn, what are we doing? Who are we helping? What I always say, as intuitive as it may sound, “Things that don’t work don’t help people.” It’s as simple as that. If you are in this work because you want to help people, then you need to be invested in knowing what does and does not work, because otherwise you’re doing something, but you’re not helping people. You may be developing your brand, patting people on the back, but you’re not helping people. If you care, then you have to care about this issue.
Palmer: Thank you for that. That’s excellent advice. We want to come back and talk to you about how you are able to advance that view, because you’re right: Not everyone in philanthropy necessarily follows it, but we are seeing more evidence of that.
One of the reasons the Chronicle does its work is to make sure that philanthropists are accountable. We ask what’s working, and we’re candid and honest about what is not working.
I appreciate all of the elements of this conversation and all of the work that you and your colleagues at Arnold Ventures do all day.
I thank our audience for listening to this terrific conversation. This is the first part of a series. We’ll be doing many more. You can always follow us on The Commons at www.philanthropy.com/thecommons. Just look at the link on our homepage and you will be able to follow everything new that we’ve published, plus newsletters and more. We thank you all and hope that everyone has a great rest of your day.
Laura, thanks again so much for joining us.
Arnold: Stacy, thank you so much for the opportunity, and again, I’m so grateful for your convening power and for your use of your convening power for these conversations. Thank you very much.
(The Commons is financed in part with philanthropic support from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, Einhorn Collaborative, and JPB Foundation. None of our supporters have any control over or input into story selection, reporting, or editing, and they do not review articles before publication. See more about the Chronicle, the grants, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.)
