The Hyatt Heiress Funding JVP And IfNotNow

Regan Pritzker chairs a $457 million foundation that funds Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, the Movement for Black Lives, and a portfolio of anti-Zionist organizations. Her father co-founded Hyatt. Her cousin is governor of Illinois. The money is documented. The donor is on the record. This is the definitive accounting.

Regan Pritzker is the daughter of Nicholas and Susan Pritzker. The extended Pritzker family — heirs to the Hyatt hotel fortune — is worth a combined $32.5 billion. The current governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, is her first cousin once removed. Her aunt Penny Pritzker is chair of the Harvard Corporation and former U.S. Commerce Secretary. Her uncle Tom Pritzker is the executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels.

She is also the co-founder and board chair of the Kataly Foundation, capitalized in 2018 with $445 million from JL Special LLC — a Nevada corporate entity whose listed managers include her father, Nicholas J. Pritzker. By 2020 the foundation reported $457 million in assets. At founding, that made Kataly larger than the entire endowment of Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation. Kataly’s stated mission is to “support the economic, political, and cultural power of Black and Indigenous communities, and all communities of color.”

Inside that mission, the foundation funds two of the most prominent anti-Zionist organizations in the United States: Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow. Both were principal organizers of the post-October 7 campus encampments at Columbia, Harvard, MIT, NYU, UCLA, and elsewhere. Both have formally endorsed the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. JVP, in January 2025, agreed to pay $677,634 to settle U.S. federal allegations of fraud relating to a $338,817 COVID-era forgivable loan it obtained by falsely certifying it was not primarily engaged in political activity. The U.S. Department of Justice found it was.

This is the story of how a Hyatt heiress, working with her parents and her husband, became one of the largest single funders of organized American anti-Zionism — and how the Pritzker name, the most consequential Jewish surname in American business and politics, came to underwrite the movement that occupied the campuses.

The Foundation: $445 million, spend-down, ten years

Kataly was incorporated at the end of 2018. The initial $445 million came in a single transfer from JL Special LLC, the Nevada entity Nicholas Pritzker uses to move family capital. The foundation is structured as a spend-down — meaning it intends to disburse its entire endowment within roughly a decade rather than operate in perpetuity. That structure is a deliberate political statement. It treats the wealth as something to be moved fast, into permanent change, before the next generation gets a vote.

Kataly’s three program areas are the Restorative Economies Fund, the Environmental Justice Resourcing Collective, and Mindfulness and Healing Justice. The CEO is Nwamaka Agbo, who built the foundation’s “restorative economics” framework. Regan’s husband, Chris Olin, a yoga and meditation practitioner, co-founded Kataly and runs the Mindfulness portfolio. Susan Pritzker — Regan’s mother — sits on the Kataly board.

In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Kataly disbursed approximately $20 million in March and April alone through Arabella Advisors, breaking its IRS-mandated 5% payout floor and signaling that the spend-down was not a slogan. By that year’s 990, Kataly’s assets had grown to $457 million.

The Grantees: JVP, IfNotNow, M4BL, BOLD, CAIR

The Heritage Foundation’s 2024 report on the financial ecosystem behind the campus encampments identifies Kataly as a funder of Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, the Movement for Black Lives, Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity, and Grassroots Global Justice. The Anti-Defamation League’s 2025 mapping of anti-Israel philanthropy adds the specific 2023 grants from Kataly’s grantee list: $50,000 to JVP, $30,000 to the Palestinian Youth Movement, and $120,000 to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Those numbers are smaller than the family’s giving to BLM affiliates, but they are not the relevant figure. Kataly’s role inside the JVP-IfNotNow ecosystem is structural, not retail. A spend-down foundation does not write recurring small checks. It validates. A $50,000 grant from a Pritzker-chaired foundation tells every other funder in the network that this grantee is inside the tent. The downstream Schwab Charitable, Fidelity Charitable, Vanguard Charitable, and Tides donor-advised dollars follow the signal, not the dollar amount.

Both JVP and IfNotNow describe themselves as Jewish-led anti-Zionist organizations. JVP, founded in 1996, reports more than 32,000 dues-paying members as of 2024. IfNotNow was founded in 2014 specifically to mobilize American Jews against Israeli policy. The two groups co-organized the largest of the 2024 campus encampments and the January 2025 Capitol building occupation that resulted in 98 arrests.

The Libra Foundation: the parent ship

Kataly is the new vehicle. The older Pritzker family foundation — and the one Regan still co-presides over — is the Libra Foundation, founded by Nicholas and Susan Pritzker in 2002. Libra reported $432 million in net assets on its 2024 tax return, down from a $556 million peak in FY2021. It has distributed roughly $148 million across 185 grants since 2018. Its board is the family: Nicholas, Susan, and their four children — Regan, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph.

Libra’s named recipients include the ACLU Foundation, Planned Parenthood, the Center for Reproductive Rights — and a portfolio of BLM-aligned organizations: the Movement for Black Lives, Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity, Black Youth Project 100, and Black Futures Lab. In 2020 Libra seeded the Democracy Frontlines Fund with a $45 million raise from 11 partner foundations; in 2023 the fund was extended through 2026 with another $35.5 million committed.

Politico reported in 2024 that Libra also funds the Tides Foundation, which fiscally sponsors the Adalah Justice Project — the U.S. arm of the Israeli anti-Zionist legal NGO Adalah. Rolling Stone published a narrow rebuttal arguing that Libra’s direct Tides grants were not earmarked for the Adalah Justice Project specifically. The rebuttal did not address two other relevant facts. First, Tides is a pooled fund; donor money is fungible. Second, Susan Pritzker separately serves as treasurer of the Solidaire Network, which publicly lists the Adalah Justice Project as a “movement partner.”

The Solidaire Channel: Susan Pritzker’s seat

The Solidaire Network is a donor collaborative that pools progressive wealth-holder capital and disburses it to movement organizations. According to its IRS 990 for the fiscal year ending June 2024, Solidaire’s outbound grants included:

• $135,000 to the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (via the Tides Center)
• $75,000 to Palestine Legal (via the Tides Center)
• $75,000 to the Palestinian Feminist Collective (via the WESPAC Foundation)
• $75,000 to the Palestinian Youth Movement (via WESPAC)
• $75,000 to Dissenters (via the Center for Third World Organizing)
• $50,000 to the U.S. Palestinian Community Network (via WESPAC)
• $50,000 to Americans for Justice in Palestine Educational Foundation
• $25,000 to National Students for Justice in Palestine (via WESPAC)

That is approximately $560,000 in a single fiscal year routed from Solidaire — where Susan Pritzker is treasurer — into the WESPAC and Tides apparatus that fiscally sponsors the most active U.S. pro-Palestine organizations. Solidaire’s sister entity, Solidaire Action, works directly with JVP Action, JVP’s 501(c)(4) advocacy arm, and with U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights Action.

The Family Map

This needs to be said plainly because the Pritzker name is constantly aggregated. There are roughly a dozen branches of the family, each with separate trusts and separate philanthropic infrastructure. Regan, Nicholas, and Susan are one branch. They are not Penny. They are not Tom. They are not JB.

Penny Pritzker, U.S. Commerce Secretary under Obama and the current chair of the Harvard Corporation, has been one of the most prominent American voices condemning antisemitism on the Harvard campus during the encampment period — encampments funded, in part, by her cousin’s foundation. Tom Pritzker runs Hyatt and is one of the largest donors to AIPAC and to the Pritzker Family Building at Tel Aviv University. JB Pritzker is the sitting Democratic governor of Illinois and a frequently mentioned 2028 presidential contender.

When the Politico story on Libra broke in 2024, JB Pritzker — Susan and Nicholas’s nephew — dismissed it at a Springfield press conference as “a completely false story.” He cited the Rolling Stone rebuttal. He did not address Solidaire. He did not address Kataly. He did not address the Heritage Foundation report. The political cost of the family connection has not yet hit the political asset.

The Donor on the Record

None of this is in shadow. Regan Pritzker has been an open, named, and quoted donor for nearly a decade. Inside Philanthropy profiled her in 2021 as a Pritzker heir “pursuing the democratization of wealth.” She has co-authored an open letter to the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates titled “Tax Us More.” She has described her own work as advancing the “Just Transition movement” and “taking leadership in organizing progressive wealth holders.”

She graduated from Stanford with a B.A. in English literature and holds a master’s from UC Berkeley. She was a substitute schoolteacher before taking a larger role at Libra in 2015. She co-chairs the Global Greengrants Fund. She has worked at her family’s Tao Capital — Nicholas Pritzker’s San Francisco venture firm, an early investor in Uber, Tesla, and SpaceX — since at least 2018. She lives in the Bay Area with Chris Olin and their children.

She is not hiding. The story is that the story has not been told.

The Test

There is one test that matters when evaluating progressive philanthropy in the post-October 7 environment. It is not the donor’s stated values. It is not the foundation’s mission statement. It is not the grantee’s self-description.

The test is this: did the dollar end up at an organization that endorses BDS, opposes the existence of a Jewish state, or organized the campus encampments? If yes, the funder owns the outcome — regardless of how the program area was labeled when the wire went out.

By that test, the Kataly Foundation is a funder of organized American anti-Zionism. The Libra Foundation, where Regan Pritzker is co-president of the board, is a funder of the Tides apparatus that fiscally sponsors the U.S. arm of Adalah. The Solidaire Network, where Susan Pritzker is treasurer, is a direct funder of Palestine Legal, the Palestinian Youth Movement, and National Students for Justice in Palestine.

Three vehicles. Three Pritzkers. One ecosystem.

Comment

Regan Pritzker did not respond to a request for comment. The Kataly Foundation did not respond to a request for comment on the record about its giving to Jewish Voice for Peace or IfNotNow. The Libra Foundation did not respond to a request for comment about the Adalah Justice Project reporting. The Solidaire Network did not respond to a request for comment on Susan Pritzker’s role.

Edited on Jun 30, 2026