Jennifer Downing

Operating Partner

Jen Downing is an Operating Partner at Ara focused primarily on developing and executing growth plans alongside Ara’s portfolio company leaders. She joined Ara after spending the first decade of her career in strategy consulting and several years in public service.

While a Senior Manager at Bain & Company, Jen led client engagements including value creation plans for private equity portfolio companies, climate tech investment strategies for investors, integration of sustainability priorities into food & ag company operations, and scenario-planning for energy transition investments.

Jen joined the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office in 2022. While there, she chaired the 1706 Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Program which committed over $40B of low-cost loans to improve US power and gas infrastructure. In her role on DOE’s ‘Liftoff’ team, Jen led the 2023 publication of the Pathway to Commercial Liftoff for Virtual Power Plants—a national strategy for increasing grid flexibility and distributed energy solutions—and co-authored ​similar work on advanced grid technologies in 2024 and 2025.

Jen holds a BA in Ethics, Politics, and Economics from Yale and an MBA from Harvard, where she was a Baker Scholar. In her free time, she can be found trail running, ski mountaineering, or rock climbing in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, pretending she’s not just a weekend warrior.