A new nonprofit filed its incorporation paperwork on Aug. 6, with an address in Ventura and the name Save Our Home Planet Action, Inc. Its stated purposes included “raising awareness of the current environmental crisis,” land preservation and restoration and lobbying and advocacy.
It had no website, no known donors and no apparent source of revenue. But it did have money. Ten days after its founding, it gave nearly $900,000 to two political action committees.
Its political spending in the summer and fall of 2024 totaled $2.2 million, given to five different PACs that supported Democrats in last year’s state and federal election campaigns, according to reports filed with the Federal Elections Commission.
This caught the eye of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan campaign finance and government ethics watchdog group in Washington, D.C. It’s perfectly legal for corporations or nonprofits to donate to political action committees. But they can only give their own money. They cannot take money from an unknown person, company or group and redirect it to political campaigns.
Someone who does that, hiding the actual source of the money they’re donating to political groups, is known as a “straw donor.” Last month, the Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the FEC accusing Save Our Home Planet Action of participating in a straw donor scheme.
“In a straw donor scheme, one person gives money to a second person, who contributes the money, and only the second person’s name shows up in the official report,” said Shanna Ports, the Campaign Legal Center’s senior counsel for campaign finance. “These schemes are illegal. They completely undermine transparency in elections.”
The Campaign Legal Center’s complaint is against Save Our Home Planet Action and “any unknown persons” who supplied its funds. But the group doesn’t really think these persons are unknown: Its complaint identifies the Ventura-based outdoor apparel retailer Patagonia or people affiliated with Patagonia, as the likely source of the money.
The complaint refers $1.4 million in questionable donations, rather than $2.2 million, because Save Our Home Planet Action’s largest single donation wasn’t reported until after the Campaign Legal Fund had drafted its complaint, Ports said.
Patagonia representatives declined The Star’s requests for an interview.
“We’re aware of the complaint and expect to respond in due course,” Patagonia spokesman J.J. Huggins said in an email to The Star. “We cannot comment further at this time.”
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Nonprofit’s connections to Patagonia
The FEC complaint cites two clear connections between Save Our Home Planet Action and Patagonia. The first is the name: “Save Our Home Planet” is a slogan Patagonia has used many times, including on T-shirts and in its mission statement.
The second is the address on Save Our Home Planet Action’s filings. It’s 259 W. Santa Clara St. in Ventura, the same as Patagonia’s corporate headquarters.
There is another connection, one not mentioned in the FEC complaint. According to corporate records filed with the California Secretary of State, Save Our Home Planet Action has two executives: Greg Curtis, the CEO and corporate secretary, and Charlie Bischoff, the chief financial officer.
Both men work for Patagonia or its parent company, according to their LinkedIn profiles. Curtis was an attorney for Patagonia from 2014 to 2022 and is now executive director of the Holdfast Collective, the nonprofit holding company that owns Patagonia. Bischoff has been Patagonia’s treasury director since 2018 and is also the part-time director of finance and operations for the Holdfast Collective.
The five recipients of Save Our Home Planet Action’s $2.2 million in donations are all large, well known organizations that support Democrats running for state or federal offices. Collectively, these PACs spent more than $1.3 billion in the 2024 election cycle.
Save Our Home Planet Action gave $1.2 million in two separate donations to LCV Victory Fund, a PAC affiliated with the League of Conservation Voters that supports environmentally focused candidates and causes. The rest of the nonprofit’s donations went to PACs that spent big on Democratic candidates for president, the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives and state legislative races.
Ports said it appears “likely” that Patagonia or executives who work for the company created and funded the new nonprofit and directed its spending. They didn’t try very hard to cover their tracks, but she said the law requires a clear disclosure of the source of the funds.
“Because of how quickly this organization started passing money on to political committees, it suggests that the people who funded it gave that money exactly to be donated to these committees, and they get to hide their identities in the process,” Ports said.
‘Always an uphill battle’ at the FEC
Save Our Home Planet Action was established under section 501(c)(4) of the U.S. tax code. That means it’s a social welfare nonprofit rather than a charitable nonprofit. Nonprofits of that sort can spend unlimited amounts on politics and do not have to disclose their donors. Donations to them are not tax deductible, like they are for charitable, non-political nonprofits, which fall under section 501(c)(3) of the tax code.
Social welfare nonprofits are often big players in U.S. politics. Two classic examples are the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Rifle Association. But the ACLU and the NRA solicit donations from the general public, and their missions and political goals are well known.
It’s not clear how anyone would donate to Save Our Home Planet Action, and the group hasn’t taken any public actions other than its recent campaign spending. Those facts lend support to the theory that it exists solely to funnel campaign contributions, said Saurav Ghosh, the Campaign Legal Center’s director of federal campaign finance.
“Is this a nonprofit in the sense that it has some larger mission consistent with its nonprofit status, or is it a nonprofit in the sense that it’s being used to make political contributions that are really coming from someone else?” Ghosh said.
Ports said the Campaign Legal Center typically finds a couple of potential straw donor schemes in every new batch of FEC filings. It only files complaints with the FEC about “the most egregious” examples, she said.
“It’s always an uphill battle with complaints at the FEC,” Ports said. “They’ve been moving in a deregulatory direction lately and not taking action on many complaints, and on top of that, they are a pretty slow-moving agency when they do decide to act.”
The penalty for a straw donor scheme would typically be a fine, Ports said. The FEC does not publicize its fine schedule, she said, to keep political operatives from budgeting for violations as part of the cost of doing business.
“We hope the FEC takes these complaints seriously,” Ports said. “This is one of the only tools we have against dark money.”
Tony Biasotti is an investigative and watchdog reporter for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tbiasotti@vcstar.com. This story was made possible by a grant from the Ventura County Community Foundation’s Fund to Support Local Journalism.