Amos Hostetter is co-founder and trustee of the Barr Foundation and chairman and CEO of Pilot House Associates, LLC. In 1963, Amos co-founded Continental Cablevision and served as its chairman and CEO from 1980 to 1996. During this period Continental grew to become the third largest company in the cable television business. Renamed Media One in 1996 when acquired by US West, the company was subsequently sold to AT&T and then to Comcast.

During his cable years, Amos served continuously on the board of the National Cable Television Association and as its chairman from 1973 to 1974. He was a founding director and chairman of C-SPAN and of Cable in the Classroom, and he was a founder of Cable Labs. Amos also served on the Children’s Television Workshop (Sesame Street) board and was appointed by President Ford to the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. For his contributions to the cable industry, Amos has been inducted into the Broadcasting Hall of Fame, the Cable Television Hall of Fame, and the Cable TV Pioneers. In addition, in 1993, he was recognized with the Walter Kaitz Foundation Diversity Advocate award for his efforts to increase diversity in the cable workforce, and in 2016 The Cable Center awarded Amos the Bresnan Ethics in Business Award.

Chair emeritus of the boards of Amherst College and WGBH, Amos is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and he has served on the boards of AT&T, Colonial Williamsburg Society, Nantucket Conservation Foundation, New England Medical Center, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Perkins School for the Blind, North Bennet Street School, and Belmont Hill School.

Amos earned a bachelor’s degree from Amherst College and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, which recognized him with an Alumni Achievement Award in 1994.

Amos currently co-chairs (with the Mayor of Boston), the Boston Green Ribbon Commission, a council of business, institutional, and civic leaders convened in 2010 by former Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, working to develop shared strategies for fighting climate change in coordination with the City’s Climate Action Plan. In 2012, Amos received the Norman B. Leventhal Excellence in City Building Award from A Better City, in recognition of leadership, innovation, and significant contribution to Boston in the area of the environment. In 2018, The Trustees of Reservation named Amos Conservationist of the Year with the Charles Elliot Award.

Barbara Hostetter is co-founder and chair of the Board of Trustees of the Barr Foundation. She served as the Foundation’s president from its inception through 2014, managing its early grantmaking, overseeing organizational development, and shaping grantmaking strategies, in partnership with Barr’s first two Executive Directors. With the appointment of a president in 2014, she shifted to a focus on leading Barr’s governance evolution while continuing to partner with the president in the Foundation’s oversight.

Barbara is actively engaged in Boston’s civic life in a variety of leadership roles. She is currently a trustee and chair of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and she 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 and was actively involved in the creation of the new wing that opened in 2012.

Barbara is a member of the Arts Advisory Council for the Boston Public Schools and the Council of Advisors for Historic Boston, Inc., and the Friends Council for the Friends of the Public Garden. Her past service includes the boards of the New England Aquarium, Friends of the Public Garden, Milton Academy, and the Massachusetts Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children. She was also appointed by Governor Romney as a founding member of the Stewardship Council for the Department of Conservation and Recreation.

Caroline Walsh is the former vice president of professional services and customer success at Catalant Technologies, a Boston-based software company whose technology and programs enable enterprises to get mission-critical work done faster. During her tenure at Catalant, Caroline built out the company’s customer delivery function and team, responsible for implementing Catalant’s software solution and ensuring that customers recognize maximum value through use of the technology. She previously served as a consultant and case team leader at Parthenon-EY, a strategy consultancy.

Caroline began her career in the nonprofit sector with The Boston Foundation, where she served on the leadership team for the foundation’s StreetSafe Boston initiative, a five-year effort to reduce citywide violence through a focus on 20 of Boston’s most violent gangs. As StreetSafe knowledge and impact manager, Caroline led design and implementation of systems to capture programmatic data to help assess the effort’s impact and inform decisions on program strategy and operations.

Caroline has served on the board of the Trinity Boston Foundation and as a volunteer with Minds Matter of Boston, a college access organization. At Minds Matter, she served as volunteer director of grants and strategy, and as a mentor for three years.

Caroline earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Jim was named president and a trustee of the Barr Foundation in May 2014. Since his arrival, Barr has experienced significant growth, as annual grantmaking has tripled during this time, and Barr’s staff has more than doubled in size. Early in his tenure, Jim led the Foundation through a strategic review of each of Barr’s core focus areas of arts and creativity, climate, and education. Subsequently, he oversaw the strategy development and launch of special initiatives to advance access to Boston’s waterfront and to promote racial wealth equity.

A hallmark of Jim’s leadership has been a commitment to transparency and openness regarding the Foundation’s work and a willingness to use Barr’s reputation and voice to further its mission. He has also partnered closely with Barr’s co-founders, Barbara and Amos Hostetter, to expand and evolve the role of the Foundation’s board. Now comprised of a majority of non-family members, Barr’s board provides strategic direction for all aspects of the foundation’s work and operations and, in 2020, made explicit a new core value – to center racial equity – complementing a set of enduring values defined by Barr’s founders. 

Prior to the Barr Foundation, Jim spent over two decades in a variety of roles at The James Irvine Foundation in California, including service as president and chief executive officer from 2003 through 2014. Before working in philanthropy, Jim was a high school English teacher in San Francisco, after earning a bachelor’s in English and a master’s in education from Stanford University. 

Jim maintains a broad range of volunteer engagements, currently serving as board president of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, vice chair of the board at the Kaiser Family Foundation, and as a trustee of the Eastern Bank Foundation. In 2023, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu appointed Jim to serve as a trustee of the Boston Public Library for a five-year term. Elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Jim participates actively on various philanthropic leadership groups as well. Jim’s prior board involvement includes a ten-year term as a Stanford University trustee. He has also served as chair of the boards of the College Futures Foundation, KQED Public Broadcasting, the Stanford Alumni Association, and Larkin Street Youth Services, and as vice chair of the Monterey Bay Aquarium. He is also a co-founder and former board chair of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations.

Jim’s writings on a range of topics have appeared in the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chronicle of Philanthropy, and Stanford Social Innovation Review, among other outlets. And he has been a featured speaker, panelist, moderator, or guest for a wide range of events and outlets covering and contributing to a stronger social sector, including the Center for Effective Philanthropy, the Communications Network, PEAK Grantmaking, and Inside Philanthropy, among others.

Lee Pelton is the CEO & President of The Boston Foundation, one of the nation’s leading philanthropic organizations with $1.8 billion in assets. He joined the Foundation in June 2021, after serving as President of Emerson College (2011-2021) and Willamette University (1998-2011).

In May 2023, he ranked #3 on Boston Magazine’s annual list of the most influential people in Boston, following Maura Healey, the newly elected governor of the Commonwealth and Massachusetts Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley.

Pelton has positioned The Boston Foundation, one of the nation’s first and most influential community foundations, as an agent for social change by centering equity in its programs, grantmaking and civic leadership., Under his leadership, the Foundation’s defining ambition is to achieve equity, which first involves acknowledging and then seeking to eliminate the structural and underlying causes of outcome disparities for historically marginalized communities.

A signature Boston Foundation program is its Racial Wealth Partnership, established in late 2022, as part of the Boston Foundation’s commitment to close racial wealth gaps in Greater Boston and the region by expanding homeownership by people of color. The Partnership is a broad-based group of more than 40 members representing sectors including banking and finance, housing, issue advocacy, government, healthcare, life sciences and education.

As a college president for 23 years, he led with a core belief that higher education must serve to deepen students’ appreciation of humanities. He believes that the nation still looks to colleges and universities to solve its most pressing problems and, as such, college and university presidents have an obligation – in addition to broad mission driven duties on their campuses – to engage in the larger society. To Pelton, nurturing the humanistic spirit also goes hand in hand with confronting and trying to solve the urgent moral and social problems of the moment.

Mark Edwards is the CEO and co-founder of Upstream USA, a nonprofit that is focused on ensuring equitable, patient-centered contraceptive care is provided as basic healthcare. Alongside a team of clinical advisors and public health professionals, Upstream partners with healthcare organizations and systems across the country to transform the delivery of contraceptive care, so that patients have access to the full range of contraceptive services. Under Mark’s leadership, Upstream is already the largest organization in the US using an evidence-based, sustainable program model focused on improving contraceptive access in primary care. Since launching in 2014, Upstream has grown from working with a single health center serving just 4,000 women of reproductive age to working in 33 states and launching a national scaling plan to reach more than five million patients by 2030. Upstream’s work and partnerships have been featured in The New York Times, Harvard Public Health, Bloomberg, Politico, and Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Prior to co-founding Upstream, Mark was the founder and executive director of Opportunity Nation, a national bipartisan campaign made up of 300 national nonprofits focused on expanding economic mobility through bipartisan federal policy reform. Mark is a Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation Entrepreneur, an Ashoka Fellow and delivered a 2023 TED talk about Upstream’s founding story. He has served on more than a dozen nonprofit boards and advisory committees and currently serves as a Trustee for the Barr Foundation. Mark is a graduate of Harvard College, the proud father of three girls, a grandfather of three grandsons, and lives with his wife in Massachusetts.

Sue Tierney is a senior advisor at Analysis Group, an economic consulting firm headquartered in Boston. She was a managing principal in the company’s Boston office from 2003 through 2016, and now works out of Analysis Group’s Chicago office. Sue is an expert on energy and climate mitigation policy, and on economic and environmental regulation of the electric and gas industries. She has consulted to businesses, government agencies, foundations, tribes, environmental groups, and other organizations.

Sue previously served as assistant secretary for policy at the U.S. Department of Energy. In Massachusetts, she served as secretary for environmental affairs, commissioner of the Department of Public Utilities, chair of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority board, and chair of the Massachusetts Oceans Commission. She taught in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning and at the University of California, Irvine, and was a visiting fellow in policy practice at the Energy Policy Institute of the University of Chicago.

Sue serves as chair of the Resources for the Future board. She also serves on the board of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the U.S. Energy Foundation, Climate Lead, and the Coalition for Green Capital. She previously chaired the U.S. Department of Energy’s Electricity Advisory Committee. She chairs the Board on Energy and Environmental Systems at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and has served on numerous National Academies’ committees.

Sue earned a bachelor’s degree in art history from Scripps College and a master’s degree and Ph.D. in regional planning from Cornell University. After living in the Boston area for three and a half decades and raising her two now-adult sons there, she now lives outside of Chicago.

Tracy Palandjian is CEO and Co-Founder of Social Finance, a national nonprofit and registered investment advisor. In 2011, Tracy co-founded Social Finance with Sir Ronald Cohen and David Blood to seed the Pay For Success field in the United States, sparking a national conversation about new funding models to tackle systemic challenges and drive measurable impact. Since then, Social Finance has mobilized over $400 million in new investments designed to achieve improved outcomes across a range of issue areas, including economic mobility, health, and housing. In 2024, the organization launched the Social Finance Institute to advance the field through actionable research and educational outreach.

Prior to Social Finance, Tracy was a Managing Director for eleven years at The Parthenon Group, where she established and led the Nonprofit Practice to support foundations and NGOs to accomplish their missions in the U.S. and globally. Tracy also worked at Wellington Management Company and McKinsey & Company.

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, Tracy is a frequent speaker and writer on impact investing, social innovation, and results-oriented policymaking. She is an author of Workforce Realigned: How New Partnerships Are Advancing Economic Mobility, and co-author of Investing for Impact: Case Studies Across Asset Classes. Tracy co-founded the U.S. Impact Investing Alliance, where she serves as Vice Chair. She is a member of the board of the International Foundation for Valuing Impacts and a former Trustee of the Global Steering Group on Impact Investing.

Tracy is a member of the Harvard Corporation and serves on the boards of The Surdna Foundation, The Barr Foundation, and The Boston Foundation. She is an Independent Director of Affiliated Managers Group (NYSE: AMG). Previously, Tracy served as Board Chair of Facing History and Ourselves. She also served on the boards of RFK Human Rights, Milton Academy, and Mass General Brigham. She is a 2019 recipient of Harvard Business School’s Alumni Achievement Award.

A native of Hong Kong, Tracy is fluent in Cantonese and Mandarin. She graduated from Harvard College with a B.A. magna cum laude in Economics and holds an M.B.A. with high distinction from Harvard Business School, where she was a Baker Scholar.

Vanessa Calderón-Rosado, Ph.D., is chief executive officer of Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción (IBA), a community development corporation dedicated to empowering and engaging individuals and families to improve their lives through high-quality affordable housing, education, and arts programs. Under Vanessa’s leadership since 2003, IBA has become the largest Latino-led nonprofit organization in Greater Boston. It controls a portfolio of 667 affordable housing units in its South End Villa Victoria development and in Roxbury and Mattapan.

Vanessa was selected as a Barr Fellow in 2009, and in 2010, she became the first Latina ever to be appointed to the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. In 2014, she was appointed to the City of Boston’s Housing Task Force and Women’s Commission. She has served as advisor to numerous other task forces, commissions, and high-profile executive searches, including those for Boston’s Police Department and Public Health Commission.

Vanessa is a founding board member of the Margarita Muñiz Academy, the first dual-language innovation high school in Massachusetts, and a co-founder of the Greater Boston Latino Network. She serves on the boards of the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations (MACDC), the Boston Foundation, the Yawkey Foundation, and the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. She is also a member of the Boston Foundation’s Latino Equity Fund Advisory Committee and Eastern Bank’s Board of Advisors.

Vanessa was born and raised in Puerto Rico, where she earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Puerto Rico. She earned a doctorate in public policy from UMass Boston and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Cambridge College.