NOBODY SAID PHILANTHROPY WAS PERFECT
Finding philanthropic focus takes time and practice. People who have been through the process say it’s about trial and error. It’s also not uncommon for new volunteers or donors to discover that a cause or an organization turns out to be the wrong match, and they need to move on. Despite having more resources than most and a meticulous plan, that’s what happened to Diana Barrett.
Brainy and accomplished, Barrett has had a career in public health policy, teaching at both the Harvard Business School and its School of Public Health. She focused on business leadership in the social sector and how public-private partnerships can reduce poverty and disease, particularly HIV/AIDS. “I felt seriously that you’re only on earth for a limited time and this is not a dress rehearsal,” she says. “You need to work to change the world while you’re in it.”
Her mother was wealthy, and that made life in Boston with three kids and her husband, Bob Vila, the home-improvement TV star, more comfortable. Yet Barrett made serious efforts to hide her money, down to being self-conscious about the car she drove. “I had to be careful how I positioned myself, as an academic,” she says. “Women had a hard enough time. A wealthy woman would have been dismissed as a dilettante.” A few times a year, Barrett would write charitable checks, often to Paul Farmer’s well-known organization Partners in Health, which provides medical care in developing areas. “But I was essentially just giving away money,” she says. “I wasn’t putting it to work.”
Years before, on the advice of a lawyer, she and her mother had set up a small private foundation that was administered by a larger community foundation. Like so many of the family foundations established in that generation, its sole purpose was tax savings. No one in the family was interested in learning about giving. No one had ever assessed the money’s potential.
Then, in 2004, Barrett’s mother died, and the foundation’s assets jumped from a few million dollars to $28 million. “That made it a serious proposition,” says Barrett. Around the same time, she and Vila, whose kids were grown, decided to move to New York. She turned to philanthropy full-time, helped by a colleague she hired. Unsurprisingly, given her background, Barrett began looking at “pockets of poverty in New York’s five boroughs,” with the idea of providing social services and health care. “My mother was Hispanic, and my husband is Cuban. We have an adopted Colombian daughter. I wanted to be relevant for the huge Hispanic community here.”
For more than a year, Barrett and her associate researched, made field visits, and ran neighborhood zip code screens, looking for incidences of asthma, nutritional deficiencies, and other indicators of where their efforts would most count. Ultimately, she says, “we decided that funding organizations that combat such problems wasn’t worth it.” Why? “Nonprofits fight for every dollar and they’re highly autonomous. They don’t want to share plans or play in the same sandbox with other organizations. There’s an inbred fear and dislike of collaborating. We thought we’d be wasting our time and money.”
Nobody said philanthropy was perfect.
Soon after, “out of the blue,” a friend asked Barrett to look at an assembly cut, or early version, of a documentary called Born Into Brothels, with an eye to offering funding. “It was a sea change, a paradigm shift,” she says. “I realized that telling a great story was a better way to raise awareness and address an issue, especially if it was in a movie that people want to sit through.” The film went on to win an Oscar for best documentary in 2005.
Barrett shifted gears. Today her foundation, Fledging Fund, supports media projects “that target entrenched social problems.” Recent grantees include filmmakers who produced an Emmy-award-winning documentary about Abu Ghraib, the prison near Baghdad where American soldiers abused Iraqi prisoners. Another film, about ethnic rape in the Congo, won an award at the Sundance Film Festival.
A recent Barrett project, Very Young Girls, follows a number of young women who became prostitutes in New York City. One fourteen-year-old is lured from her home, beaten, raped, held captive, and sold for sex. When found by the police, the teen—not the male customer—is arrested. Men who have sex with underage girls are supposed to be criminally prosecuted, but the law has a loophole: if the child accepts money for sex, the man becomes a john and, as such, is usually simply fined. Legally, the child becomes the criminal. “Today, the average age of entry into prostitution in the U.S. is thirteen,” says Barrett. “The law is insane, and I hope to change it.” The film won an award at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival.
To leverage the influence of such films, Barrett has developed her own model. She chooses an issue she thinks important and provides “finishing funds,” or the last bridge needed to complete a project. “First funds are too risky,” she says. Grantee filmmakers are required to write a statement about what kind of impact their film can make. They must also produce a trailer so that the film can be advertised and marketed. Barrett then mounts an outreach effort, offering, for example, free screenings to nonprofits and advocacy groups, which function as fund-raisers and build awareness.
These days, with the zip code scans well behind her, her foundation assets valued at more than $30 million, and a few additional staff members, Barrett says, “I believe an emotional driver is important to create change. But you need more than charisma or passion. You need to find the real experts and leaders in the field and be strategic.” She adds, “I’m always annoyed by the phrase ‘giving away money,’ because you don’t make a difference with money alone. You need to invest in a community and get to know it. You’ve got to put in time in the trenches and go to board meetings and understand the organization you’re funding.