The Barr Foundation, a Boston mainstay with $1.6 billion in assets, announced last week it would leap beyond the city limits and expand its focus to include New England projects and selective grants nationwide.
The foundation is reshaping its support of projects in the arts, climate change, and education. And with an increase of nearly $20 million in its grant budget this year, it’s poised to make a greater impact.
The philanthropy could grow far bigger in coming decades.
Barr’s founders, the cable-television pioneer Amos Hostetter Jr., now in his late 70s, and his wife, Barbara, have amassed a fortune of $3.1 billion, according to Forbes magazine.
The foundation’s chief executive, James Canales would not divulge if the couple plans to make any large gifts to Barr in the near future. But clearly the grant maker is readying for growth.
Mr. Canales took over in 2014 after leading the James Irvine Foundation, which last week also announced a new focus: helping California’s working poor attain greater economic opportunities and a more effective political voice. At Barr, Mr. Canales has helped transform the grant maker from a quiet, guarded philanthropy into a muscular local leader. Over the next several months, Barr will go into greater detail about plans to expand its footprint. In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Canales discussed the direction the foundation is taking. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity:
Why has the foundation decided to expand geographically?
This is a foundation based in Boston, that will be based in Boston for the foreseeable future. But you’ll see the foundation engaging more broadly outside of just Boston, engaging in other New England states and perhaps more broadly in the Northeast. In addition, we intend to identify targeted opportunities where it makes sense for Barr to be part of broader national conversations around the issues we care deeply about.
We see great opportunities to learn from what’s going on in other regions of the country where they might be dealing with some of the issues we deal with. We also think there is an opportunity for us to shine a light on the work that’s being done in Boston and greater New England that might be of interest to others.
Doesn’t taking a regional focus water down your efforts in Boston?
We did intentionally say let’s not dilute the impact we can have by waking up tomorrow and saying let’s become a national foundation. We’re better off starting regionally and yet not missing out on opportunities to connect nationally. For example, we’re invested in the ArtPlace America initiative, which is around creative place making [an effort to place arts and culture at the center of city planning and community development]. That’s a great example of where we see Barr at the table with national funders in a national effort, knowing there’s a real opportunity to drive the impact locally. That’s the kind of national partnership we see as exciting.
You’re going to see an increase in grant making in part because of our asset growth and in part because we committed resources in earlier years that were being applied to payout in future years. In the past year we granted about $52 million. This year it will be closer to $70 million. As we are able to put more resources into our work, it is less about taking resources out of Boston and more seeing that those additive resources support the regional work. We have not set a guideline for any proportion of grant making to Boston, but we want people to understand we’re committed to Boston.
Why should a big issue like climate change be addressed locally? And should foundations focus on dealing with the impending hardship of a changing climate rather than on the tougher task of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions?
A lot of the progress is being made at the city level, at the regional level. Massachusetts has made major progress toward its 2025 emissions goals and has made progress toward its 2050 goals. We want to continue to invest in this region’s ability to meet those goals.
At the same time, we’re committed to this two-year exploration around resiliency [in which the foundation will support climate-change preparedness], which is more Boston-centric. We see a real opportunity to make sure Boston is preparing adequately for what we know is an inevitability. We’re already seeing it in the recent storms we’ve had and when the high tide comes: Our office is on the waterfront so we literally see it outside our window. We are really trying to prepare on both sides of that equation.
Are the Hostetters preparing to leave the foundation with a large legacy gift?
The whole purpose of this planning effort is to establish a set of bold, ambitious, and exiting plans for the future that will create the platform for a foundation we know is going to be undergoing growth and expansion. There’s no timetable for that, but this is a foundation that is going to be in a period of expansion for some time.
We are looking to add board members in the next 12 to 18 months. As far as the balance between family members and nonfamily members, we don’t have specific numbers, but the intention is that over time the board would be governed by more nonfamily members than family members.
Barr will ultimately evolve into a foundation that will be deeply rooted and committed to this region but governed by a group of trustees that will make their own decisions over time.
How will you change your focus in education?
Education is the area that will have the most significant shift. We’ve had a very broad portfolio that has run the gamut from investments in early education to investments in K through 12 education, principally through the Boston public schools. Going forward we decided to focus on the secondary to postsecondary transition, thinking about how we increase the number of young people connecting to success both in and beyond high school.
What are we doing to continue to engage young people who are at the greatest risk of dropping out to see that the high-school experience can be relevant to their lives? What we’re interested in is not a bifurcated approach that says, ‘OK, there’s a college track over here and a career track over there’ and then put all the kids who can’t achieve academically into the career track and provide them jobs that aren’t going to create a life-sustaining wage.
Instead the question is how can you marry a rigorous academic program with a program of study for kids that opens their eyes to different pathways where they can be successful professionally? It may culminate in a high-school degree that leads to a credential that leads to a job. It may be a high-school degree that leads to an apprenticeship that leads to a job, and it may be a high-school degree that leads to community college that then leads to college.
You have said Barr intends to be both a steward and a catalyst for social and environmental change. Does being a steward mean you’ll provide more general operating support for grantees?
We’re not ready to release any kind of statement about X number of dollars or a certain percentage of our grant making will be general operating support. We are being as clear as we have ever been about the priorities of this foundation, with the intention of identifying partners who share those priorities and then enter into the kind of relationship that is best suited for general operating support and best suited for having open, candid, and constructive conversations about how we can best advance the work. If that means augmenting grants when they’re midstream or providing additional support for things we didn’t anticipate, I think those are all ideas we’re open to. We’re not going to be operating by hard and fast arbitrary rules as much as trying to invest in leaders and ensuring we’re driving impact.
You have written that logic models and a reliance on metrics can “sanitize” the work of foundations. What is the role of measurement at Barr versus using judgment and gut instincts?
As we lay out a set of priorities, the logical next step is to get clear about what we’re trying to accomplish and holding ourselves accountable to that. Let’s think about metrics and indicators we can measure. Obviously there are certain areas in climate, for example, especially looking at mitigation work where we can track certain progress.
We have made a decision as a foundation to stay invested in a significant way in arts and creativity. Arts and creativity are not the first areas you’d think of when you think of hard metrics. Ultimately we are making a judgment as a foundation that inspiring the kind of creativity that creates a thriving, dynamic region is important. Part of that is about nourishing the soul and part of that is about elevating our aspirations. Those are things that are hard to measure. If we were driven by metrics and needing to point to certain numbers to say we’ve made progress, that might not be the first place we’d gravitate.
Note: An earlier version of this article said that Mr. Canales took over at Barr in 2013. He was appointed in 2013 but started the job in 2014.
