Welcome to Barr’s New Website

I invite you to explore the site and share your feedback with us. In his welcome message, Stefan Lanfer, Barr’s director of communications, describes in greater detail the new features and how they fit within our broader communications strategy. We hope you find this new Barr website to be as accessible, engaging, and useful as we aspire for it to be.

While such changes may appear cosmetic, we intend for them to signal the next era for Barr: one of greater transparency and open communication, deeper engagement with our many partners and stakeholders, and full intention to add our voice and perspective to advance our mission.

As part of our planning this past year, we have adopted a new mission and outlined a set of values. In addition, we want our many partners to experience Barr as one foundation, which can be a challenge given the range of goals we pursue through different programs. To address this, we articulate below those elements that serve to unite how Barr carries out its philanthropic mission. Indeed, this new website is but one manifestation of Barr’s approach to philanthropy:

• We foster a flexible and nimble culture that permits us to respond to the evolving circumstances in our environment, that encourages attentiveness to the needs of our partners, and that avoids rigidity and bureaucracy.

• We deploy a broad range of tools and assets to advance our programmatic priorities, including convening, communications, and capacity-building.

• We share knowledge and learning in ways that contribute to deeper understanding of our work, that document both successes and failures, and that promote continuous improvement.

• We aim to be open and transparent about our work and to contribute to broader efforts that promote and advance the field of philanthropy.

• We are active collaborators with partners from all sectors, recognizing that the challenges we confront require the active engagement of multiple actors.

As I said of our values when we introduced them last fall, these commitments are not simply words on a page to be adopted and filed away; rather, they are to be expressed daily in our work.

To that end, as we launch this new site, we view it as a work in progress that will be constantly evolving and, we hope, improving. The potential of this new platform will be fully realized only if we remain attentive to sharing new information on an ongoing basis, engaging all of you in our collective work, and positioning this as one of the many tools that advances Barr’s mission.

Take a look and let us know what you think.