Jim Canales Made the Barr Foundation an Institutional Powerhouse

Jim Canales, who has led Boston’s Barr Foundation for 11 years, will step down at the end of 2025, to serve as the grant maker’s board chair and as managing director of Pilot House, the private family office of Amos and Barbara Hostetter, who created Barr with the fortune Amos made in the cable television industry.

During Canales’s run, Barr has doubled its assets to about $2.8 billion, making it one of the 25 largest private foundations in the United States. The foundation has increased its annual grant making from about $55 million to $130 million during that time and has expanded its grant-making footprint beyond Boston to New England and, on a limited basis, nationally. Along with its growing philanthropic heft, the foundation under Canales has worked to give grantees a clearer view into its workings.

Barr’s next leader, who will be announced by the end of the year, may have an even larger asset base to work with. The Hostetters, who are worth about $3.8 billion according to Forbes, have indicated they will continue to give to their foundation, but they have not committed to a specific amount.

Perhaps the biggest change the Hostetters have made, with Canales’s guidance, is what Canales calls the “ultimate gesture of power sharing.”

Rather than operate as a husband-and-wife philanthropy, Barr Foundation now requires a majority of its trustees to be independent. Currently, the Hostetters and their daughter Caroline Hostetter Walsh are the only family members on the board, which consists of nine trustees in total.

The board does not have strict mandates, Canales says. If board members chose, they can change the geographic areas of their grant making, start or terminate different programmatic areas of giving, and determine whether to spend down the foundation out of existence.

“Future generations of trustees of the Barr Foundation have full latitude to make whatever decisions they believe are in the best interests of the foundation,” he said.

Often donors will draw up strict policies about the governance of the foundations, leading to criticism that they are “giving from the grave.” But it wasn’t a hard decision to give subsequent board members the leeway to make decisions as they see fit, said Barbara Hostetter.

“The larger issue for us was imagining a foundation that was static and less relevant than it could be,” she said. “Times are going to change … and we have to trust future generations to make the right decisions.”

Working with the Hostetters, Canales helped transform Barr from a family operation, which for more than a decade after its founding in 1997 made all of its gifts anonymously, into a professionalized institutional donor.

Canales joined Barr in 2014 after serving as president at California’s Irvine Foundation. At that point, the Hostetters did not have formal program areas and operated with a staff of fewer than 20 people.

“We really didn’t have a mission statement that articulated and expressed the values of the foundation,” Canales said.

Canales and the Hostetters crafted a set of values that stress humility, risk taking, and the pursuit of equity; set up program areas that focus grants on the arts, climate, and education; and more than doubled the staff.

More recently, Canales has led other efforts, including grants designed to close the racial wealth gap, help make Boston’s waterfront more resilient to climate change, and provided nearly $7 million to protect immigrants, improve journalism, and strengthen democracy.

Perhaps what is most notable about Canales’s tenure is his dedication to causes he believes in, said Phil Buchanan, president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, which has received grants from Barr and provided consulting services for the foundation.

As many foundations consider whether a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action in college admissions makes grants based on race a target for litigation, Buchanan said Canales has remained steadfast in his commitment to racial wealth equity.

“In the face of backlash and pushback nationally, he’s been a really eloquent voice for justice and an advocate for nonprofits,” Buchanan said.

Trust-Based Philanthropy

Under Canales, Barr has steadily improved how its grantees view their working relationship with the foundation. In 2017, grantees reported that Barr operated like a “typical” funder, according to the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s Grantee Perception Report. Many grantees saw significant improvement in how well the foundation communicated with them, compared with the group’s 2012 report, which pre-dates Canales’s tenure.

Canales had his staff apply for grants under a simulation, so they could experience the process themselves. They then worked to make the process simpler and to avoid using hard-to-understand jargon in their communications with grantees.

In the center’s most recent report on Barr, grantees noted more improvement. It ranked the foundation highly in its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion; its relatively high level of unrestricted, multi-year funding; and its ability to influence policy and action beyond giving grants by advocating publicly for causes.

Barr’s transformation is unlike anything Buchanan has seen in philanthropy, with Canales turning a relatively small, anonymous grant maker into a “long-term institutional force for good,” he said.

“They’ve ceded control, and they are not in the majority,” Buchanan said of the Hostetter’s requirement that the majority of the board be independent. “That takes a lot of humility and guts.”

According to a survey released this month by the National Center for Family Philanthropy, about 40 percent of family foundations allow nonfamily members to serve on boards. But the number of family members serving as trustees has increased. This year, about 27 percent of family foundations had six or more family members on their boards, up from 19 percent five years ago.

Some other philanthropy giants, in addition to Barr, have opened up their board rooms and executive suites to outsiders. The Gates Foundation added new trustees in 2022, but Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates, who was still at the foundation at that time, retained voting control on the board. And the Freedom Together Foundation (formerly the JPB Foundation), which has had independent board members for quite some time, last year hired Deepak Bhargava, its first nonfamily member president, and has greatly expanded its staff. (The Freedom Together Foundation is a financial supporter of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.)

At Barr, Canales said one of his proudest accomplishments was beefing up the foundation’s communications department. Conveying the goals of the foundation’s grants and spreading messages about grantee progress, he said, are essential to maximize the impact of a foundation’s spending.

When he took the job, the foundation’s website was basic. The staff’s instinct, when a call came in from the press, was to “say, ‘No comment’ and move on,” Canales said.

But philanthropies, due to their privileged tax status, have an obligation to explain their work, Canales said.

“Philanthropic organizations exist to serve the public,” he said.