Jen Downing

Jen Downing is an Operating Partner at Ara Partners. She joined Ara after spending the first decade of her career in strategy consulting and several years in the US federal government.

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

Jen joined the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office in 2022. 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 and co-authored ​similar national strategies on grid modernization 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.

Ara Partners

Founded in 2017, Ara Partners is a global private markets firm focused on decarbonizing the industrial economy. The firm invests in the middle market across three strategies: Private Equity, Infrastructure, and Energy. Ara scales commercially demonstrated decarbonization solutions, supports the businesses and infrastructure that enable their adoption, and reduces emissions at the source across the conventional energy value chain. Ara operates from Houston, Boston, Dublin and Washington D.C., and as of March 31, 2026, had approximately $8.2 billion in assets under management.