The Barr Foundation is one of the largest foundations in Massachusetts, with nearly $3 billion in assets and giving that tends to prioritize its home region but also extends nationwide. Now over 25 years old, the foundation makes grants that range across its three main focus areas: arts and creativity, climate and education.
While Barr itself is fairly well known in the philanthrosphere, including for its even-handed, progressive approach to giving, what do we know about the billionaire couple behind the foundation, Amos and Barbara Hostetter?
Media mogul Amos Hostetter Jr., 88, made his fortune (currently estimated by Forbes at $3.8 billion) as a cable TV pioneer during the 1990s. Back in the ’60s, he cofounded Continental Cablevision and served as its chairman and CEO before the company sold for billions. These days, he runs Pilot House Associates, LLC.
If Forbes’ estimate of the Hostetters’ wealth is anywhere close to accurate, they’ve given away a lot more of their wealth, proportionately, than the vast majority of the super-rich — as well as the majority of Giving Pledgers, whose ranks they do not grace.
The bulk of those commitments have gone to the Barr Foundation, started in 1999, a grantmaker which has gradually evolved from a family foundation footing to become a more robust charity with dozens of staff and a mix of family and nonfamily board members. It’s perhaps fitting, then, that on May 7, the Hostetters will be honored with a 2025 Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in Scotland.
I spoke to Barbara Hostetter as part of several interviews in advance of the honor. In our conversation, I learned more about why Barbara and Amos decided to formalize their philanthropy in the late ’90s through Barr, how the foundation gradually added more leadership, including tapping the now-outgoing Jim Canales as foundation president, and thoughts on the couple’s giving legacy as they are set to receive a Carnegie Medal.
This article is the second in a series on this year’s Carnegie Medal honorees. The first piece looked at philanthropist Carol Grigor Colburn, while a future installment will cover the giving of Joe Neubauer and Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer.
“A very meaningful learning curve”: A big sale opens up more Hostetter philanthropy
The Hostetters’ philanthropic path began typically enough, with the acquisition of a big fortune in business. Born in New Jersey in 1937, Amos Hostetter graduated from Amherst College in 1958 with an economics degree and with a Harvard MBA in 1961. Two years later, Amos and his college roommate and fraternity brother, another prominent Boston businessman named H. Irving Grousbeck, founded what would become Continental Cablevision, in Ohio. Continental grew to become the third-largest company in the cable television business. In the early 1980s, Amos married Barbara, a George Washington University graduate who later worked as a merchandizer. In 1996, Continental was sold to US West for $11 billion.
Around the time of the sale, Barbara said, she and Amos started thinking more seriously about formalizing their philanthropy. “We made the decision to put most of our assets into philanthropic work. And that began a very meaningful learning curve when we were young and had a very young family.”
Having called Boston home for many years — and given that Boston was the place where the couple made their fortune — the Hostetters wanted to anchor their philanthropy there to start. “The values at the time were really about working locally, in the city that we loved very much,” Barbara said. She calls the evolution of the Barr Foundation “a story of growth.” Initially, the couple set out to understand what it meant to do strategic philanthropy. In its first decade, she said the Barr Foundation worked pretty quietly, with a small staff and a few executive directors to help guide them.
Still, in 2000, the foundation already held some $870 million in assets and gave away around $45 million. Back then, Barr already had the same fundamental focus areas it has today, only with a slightly different bent. Barr’s first foray into climate focused on green space and water in the city, but that work has since broadened in scope. Barr also focused on public school education in Boston and the local arts community — Barbara said the arts started out as the smallest focus. “We’re not far from these buckets today,” Barbara said, adding that now, grant resources for these focus areas are apportioned roughly equally.
An “inflection point” in Barr’s work, and bringing on Jim Canales
The Barr Foundation is, at heart, a place-based giver. But the meaning of “place” for Barr has broadened through the years, starting locally and since expanding to New England at large. Barbara said that at times, Barr will also work nationally.
In 2013, Barr hit what Barbara calls an “inflection point” in its evolution. During Barr’s first chapter, she served as president. But likening the moment to an adolescent bear ready to grow up, Barbara said that the foundation needed to professionalize. The Hostetters initiated a national search, ultimately convincing Jim Canales, a two-decade veteran of the James Irvine Foundation, to leave sunny California for the East Coast to serve as Barr’s first full-time president.
Canales said that he was drawn to the “deep reservoir of humility that [the Hostetters] brought to philanthropy.” He also felt an alignment of values around Barr’s focus on centering its partners and focusing on the needs of the community.
Canales has announced that he will step down as Barr’s president at the end of 2025, but will remain involved as its board chair, succeeding Barbara Hostetter. Looking back at the past decade, Canales was struck by the significant growth of the foundation. When he first came on, it held about $1.4 billion assets. Today, that number has doubled to $2.8 billion, and the foundation’s annual grantmaking has jumped from around $55 million to around $130 million today. Canales also spoke about the increase in its professional staff — from around 20 to 50.
When Canales joined Barr in 2014, he was also the foundation’s first nonfamily trustee — prior to this point, Amos and Barbara Hostetter served as Barr’s sole trustees. “I think one of the distinguishing features of the work that we’ve done is that a foundation that really started as a family foundation has evolved into a legacy foundation with real intention,” Barbara said. “We have stepped away as a family and let the foundation become professionally run, and the board reflects that, as well.”
Today, Barr has nine trustees, six of whom are nonfamily members. The hope is that with three family members still on the board, the Hostetter family will stay engaged with Barr, helping to maintain the culture and values of the foundation, but in a minority fashion. “I think Amos and I think that is our contribution as we look forward — [it] is the values. And we hope that will be a sustaining feature,” Barbara said.
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Barr’s support for the Boston arts scene, and another inflection point
I mentioned earlier that Barr’s work in the arts has ramped up over the years. A lot of that has to do with Barbara Hostetter’s personal charitable interests — she has been active in the local Boston civic scene for decades, particularly in the arts. She is currently a trustee and chair of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and serves as a trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is also a life trustee of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where she served as president of the board for 10 years.
“Boston is a city that’s filled with a myriad of arts… It’s a really important part of the work we do,” Barbara said.
At the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which holds a mixture of European, Asian and American art, Barbara was involved in the creation of a new Renzo Piano-designed wing that opened last decade, adding 80,000 square feet. “We did a wonderful transformation of a museum that had not been widely visited and had sort of gotten dusty since the founder had passed away… that now stands as one of Boston’s really, really great arts institutions,” Barbara said.
Barr also engages in more community arts work, including supporting IBA Boston, the largest Latina-led nonprofit organization in New England. Working in the South End neighborhood of Boston, its CEO, Vanessa Calderón-Rosado, is a Barr trustee, as well. Earlier this year, we also did a dive on Barr’s 10-year Creative Commonwealth Initiative, which has seen it partner with eight Massachusetts community foundations to strengthen the arts across the state.
Barr is also partnering with Boston Symphony Orchestra to bring the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra to the institution in the fall, which Canales said emphasizes the foundation’s commitment to truly meet communities where they are.
As the years go by, Barr has also learned from and built relationships with the public sector in its hometown, including Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, a first-generation Taiwanese American and an avid pianist.
Barbara said that she wants Barr to play more important civic leadership roles going forward. She brought up the summer of racial reckoning in 2020 as one moment where Barr felt more of a responsibility to step up as a civic leader, but overall, she wants the foundation to think about its voice and its ability to convene going forward. Notably, Barr was ahead of the curve on speaking up about “meeting the moment” on federal cuts and DEI disruption this year. This evokes a similar effort to respond to the challenges of Trump’s first term, while still sticking to its funding priorities.
“I think we started as a very quiet foundation, and we did a lot of our work anonymously initially, as we were on our own growth curve. And we have found our voice over time,” Barbara said. “So I think now it’s a really exciting time to think about how we amplify that voice.”
Barbara Hostetter on receiving a Carnegie Medal and looking ahead
One way the Hostetters and the Barr Foundation are stepping into the spotlight is with a Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy, which they’ll accept in Scotland on May 7. This is the third time the ceremony will be held in the U.K. since its inception in 2001 and will be hosted by the three U.K.-based Carnegie institutions: Carnegie UK, The Carnegie Dunfermline Trust and The Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland.
“It’s an enormous honor. Amos and I have not really accepted awards [up until] this point. We’ve really always believed firmly that the lens shouldn’t be on us,” Barbara said. “This is one that you just don’t say no to, because it’s a huge honor. So we accept it really with humility, on behalf of the extraordinary people that we are in service to here.”
Barbara added that she and Amos also felt aligned to the philanthropic values of Andrew Carnegie himself. By the time of his death, in 1919, Carnegie had committed nearly all of his $350 million fortune to advance education, science, culture and international peace. More than a century later, 26 organizations bear Carnegie’s name around the world today. Although they are considered part of the Carnegie “family,” these organizations remain independent entities and are related by name only.
Dame Louise Richardson, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, said that the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy allows all the Carnegie organizations to come together. Each of the institutions nominates finalists and then a smaller selection committee whittles it down. The Hostetters, Carol Colburn Grigor, and Joe Neubauer and Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer, along with UK charity Comic Relief, made the cut this year. While there isn’t a theme, Richardson did note that all of the finalists this year have a deep commitment to the arts.
“You know, the whole point of this, I think, is to encourage philanthropy. And so the philanthropic world, I think, is more developed in the U.S. than elsewhere, including in the UK. So it’s really ‘pour encourager les autres,’ as they say: to encourage other people,” Richardson said.
As for the Hostetters, Barbara had this to say: “I think we want our legacy to be that we’ve invested deeply in our communities and in our grantees… That we’ve been smart and strategic, of course, and that we’ve been able to create impact in the areas that we’ve been working in.”
