A few years back, we reported that community foundations were emerging as the “sleeping giant” of journalism philanthropy by creating discretionary grantmaking programs and encouraging donor-advised fund holders to channel support to local outlets. Developments out of Massachusetts over the past eight years point to an innovative twist on this strategy in the field of arts and culture.
In 2017, the Boston-based Barr Foundation launched the 10-year Creative Commonwealth Initiative to help Massachusetts community foundation partners strengthen arts and creativity across the state.
Equipped with Barr’s support, the initiative’s eight community foundation partners have established grantmaking programs, engaged underserved populations and leveraged knowledge-sharing networks with their peers across the state.
Slated to sunset at the end of 2026, Barr’s Creative Commonwealth Initiative is an instructive case study of how a large regional foundation can leverage its core competencies to help these “sleeping giants” scale their operations and cultivate a sustainable ecosystem around a priority area.
Partner community foundations have gone from being “transactional to transformative entities,” said Barr’s Director of Arts & Creativity E. San San Wong. “That work has to filter throughout the organization. It has to impact how donor services work, how communications work. Together, we’re engaging in trust-based philanthropy. You don’t just change the arts program activities, but the whole organization.”
Identifying community foundations as key strategic partners
Since it was founded, Barr has contributed more than $1.5 billion to charitable causes, and its three focus areas are Climate, Education, and Arts & Creativity. The foundation’s grantmaking budget for 2025 is $130 million, and its trustees are in the process of selecting a successor to President Jim Canales, who is stepping down at the end of 2025.
Wong joined Barr in 2012 and was tasked with expanding Arts & Creativity from a secondary focus area to a full program. Having spent time as a development officer, performing arts producer and consultant, she recognized that arts philanthropy was in large part powered by individual donors and saw how community foundation staff worked with DAF holders to identify local organizations to support. It became clear that community foundations were a promising partner for Barr’s growing Arts & Creativity program.
That said, Wong’s due diligence underscored that while community foundations had deep local knowledge and trusted relationships across their respective regions, their support for arts organizations was usually at the behest of a DAF holder. On the whole, staff didn’t always have refined plug-and-play grantmaking programs that could move money into the hands of arts organizations, much less measure the efficacy of that support.
This recognition, Wong said, “raised the question of, if so much of their money is locked into donor-designated purposes, what would happen if we gave them unrestricted discretionary funds?”
Helping community foundations develop programs and engage with communities
The Creative Commonwealth Initiative’s first cohort of partners were the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts, Essex County Community Foundation, the Greater Worcester Community Foundation and SouthCoast Community Foundation.
In 2017, these foundations, each of which received a six-month, $35,000 planning grant, embarked on a Planning phase, during which leaders held community meetings, conducted needs assessments and convened advisory boards to better understand their regional arts ecosystems.
The Pilot and Demonstration phase took place in 2018 and 2019. Equipped with $500,000 each, the five community foundations “experimented with their communities in many different ways,” Wong said.
During this phase, Wong and her team recognized that while community foundation staff had experience in disbursing grants through DAFs, they needed assistance in designing and evaluating discretionary grantmaking programs and telling “the broader story of the value of what a community foundation provides to the community.” As a result, Barr brought on consultants to help community foundation leaders develop programs, grant evaluation protocols and communication strategies.
How community foundations have used Barr’s support
Barr dubbed the next phase Growth and Expansion. From 2020 to 2022, Barr provided $1 million to each community foundation, for a total of $5 million. Recipients used the support to activate and scale their program approaches. In November 2024, Barr published a report capturing the initiative’s evaluation highlights from 2017 to 2022.
Barr has also commissioned a summary evaluation of the initiative, which it will publish in 2027. In what may be a preview of the report’s findings, here is an overview of how participating community foundations have used Barr’s support.
Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation
In 2017, this foundation launched the Arts Build Community initiative to increase community engagement through the arts. Interim President Kara Mikulich said the foundation has used Barr support to conduct a community-based participatory research effort to learn more about barriers to engagement among historically underserved populations; provide programmatic grants to increase engagement, especially among communities that face barriers such as cost, transportation and social discomfort; and award capacity-building grants for organizations.
Essex County Community Foundation
In a joint statement to IP, President and CEO Stratton Lloyd and Creative County Initiative program director Karen Ristuben called the foundation’s partnership with Barr a “10-year, $5 million commitment to build a thriving ecosystem.” The foundation has provided “millions of dollars of grants to hundreds of artists and hundreds of art organizations across 34 towns and cities in Essex County. We have done over 30 collaborative grant projects in the county serving over 20,000 people. And we have provided capacity-building to thousands of organizations and municipalities.”
Greater Worcester Community Foundation
Barr was “integral to helping the City of Worcester create its first-ever cultural plan prior to the pandemic,” said Greater Worcester Community Foundation President and CEO Peter Dunn, who oversees its Creative Worcester County initiative. “Its funding has been used over the last eight years to help implement and sustain elements of the plan, including capacity-building for smaller arts organizations and business development support for individual artists (i.e., helping them with the business side of art to be self-sustaining).”
Thanks to Barr’s support, its own endowed funding resources and grant funds from the City of Worcester, the Greater Worcester Community Foundation has become the largest arts and culture grantmaker in its region that doesn’t provide capital grants.
Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts
This foundation’s work with Barr’s Creative Commonwealth Initiative flows through its ValleyCreates program. Barr’s support let the foundation develop and expand grant opportunities to BIPOC artists and BIPOC-led organizations, provide capacity-building resources and pay a staff member to focus primarily on arts-related work. Barr “provided capacity support to us as a fledgling arts funder,” said President and CEO Megan Burke. “Being part of the Creative Commonwealth Initiative alongside community foundations in Massachusetts allowed us to learn and grow with a group of peers.”
To Burke’s point, during COVID, the CEOs of the five community foundations began to meet to discuss strategies. They continue to meet every month along with leaders from three community foundations that joined the cohort in 2023. In fact, the community foundation presidents who participated in those COVID-era meetings decided to take the idea statewide, launching the Massachusetts Community Foundations Partnership, a knowledge-sharing collaborative consisting of the state’s 14 community foundations.
“Coming out of the initiative, I’m so proud [the participants] took that energy and asked, ‘How do we extend our collaboration?’” Wong said.
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Community foundations are preparing for life after the Barr Foundation
All of which brings us to the current phase, “Sustainability,” from 2023 to 2026. In 2023, Barr added the Cambridge Community Foundation, Community Foundation for MetroWest and Greater Lowell Community Foundation to the initiative’s cohort.
Since then, stakeholders have focused on ensuring each community foundation thrives once the initiative winds down at the end of 2026.
Partners are creating or building endowments or field-of-interest funds, encouraging DAF holders to support their programs and exploring funding mechanisms like shared giving models. Last September, for example, the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts launched the ValleyCreates Arts and Creativity Fund, a $5 million endowment campaign “that will help to sustain everything we have built so far and fuel our important work moving forward,” Burke said.
Community foundations are also strengthening their local ecosystems by providing grants and capacity-building support to organizations, and convening arts leaders across their respective regions. “The spirit of collaboration is strong,” said Essex County Community Foundation’s Lloyd and Ristuben. “This investment has created an environment to incentivize cross-sector collaboration and help build the muscle to tackle the biggest issues in our communities for which collaboration is essential.”
It would be an understatement to say that Barr’s community foundation partners have come a long way since 2017. Back then, some of their leaders weren’t deeply familiar with their regional ecosystem while others lacked experience in managing discretionary arts grantmaking programs. Now, they’re presenting at national arts conferences.
“The way I think about the initiative is, ‘Did we do the theory of change that we set out to do?’ Wong said. “And I think we have. We’ve gotten very far along in helping to catalyze the arts movement at community foundations.”
