History & Culture

The JPB Foundation was established in 2012 as the result of a bequest from the estate of the late Jeffry Picower. His widow, Barbara Picower, became president of the foundation and chair of the board of the new entity, which was dedicated to supporting medical research, reducing poverty, and protecting the environment.

The couple met in high school in working-class Long Beach, a barrier island off the south shore of Long Island, New York. After graduation, Barbara went to secretarial school and would eventually earn a bachelor’s degree in political science from Hofstra University and master’s degrees in history, secondary education, and nutrition from New York University. Jeffry proceeded to business school, then law school, while also earning an accounting certification. “Jeffry was an enormous talent,” recalls Gerald McNamara, who met Jeffry in 1982 and is JPB’s chief investment officer. “He had an innate sense of where value was—he could see several years into the future.” Jeffry’s investment skills paid off, earning billions, and in 1989, he and Barbara started The Picower Foundation with Barbara as executive director. “Jeffry made the money, and I spent it,” says Barbara, with a smile.

Over nearly two decades, The Picower Foundation focused on education, medical research, and social justice and made grants totaling nearly $300 million. In 2002, the foundation made its largest grant—a $50 million gift to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to establish The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.

In 2008, The Picower Foundation lost nearly all of its $1 billion in assets, which had been held in accounts controlled by Bernard Madoff, who pleaded guilty to multiple counts of financial fraud.

Jeffry passed away in 2009 at the age of 67, leaving the vast majority of his estate to be used for the purpose of creating a new foundation. When the trustees of the investors who had lost money in the Madoff scandal sought to reclaim money that Jeffry had withdrawn from his Madoff accounts over the years, Barbara returned the full amount to be distributed to the claimants. The United States Attorney overseeing the settlement was quoted as saying, “Barbara Picower has done the right thing.”

In the wake of the tragedy of losing her husband and with the controversy of the Madoff scandal behind her, Barbara created The JPB Foundation with an initial gift from her late husband’s estate of $3.6 billion. After distributing over $2.7 billion since 2012, the foundation’s assets have nevertheless grown to more than$4 billion as of 2024. Its annual grantmaking grew from approximately $45 million in 2012 to $420 million in 2023.

Barbara served as the president of the foundation from 2012 until February 2024, and currently serves as chair of the board. In April of 2023, she announced that she would step down as president the following year and would be succeeded by her friend and colleague Deepak Bhargava, a JPB board member and former CEO of Community Change, a longtime grantee of the foundation.

As president, Barbara was not your typical figurehead—she would edit the board materials, participate in every grantee meeting possible, sign every grant check (until the foundation went paperless during the COVID-19 pandemic), and call every organization whose grant was approved to give them the good news.

Indeed, Barbara would often say that she was a president, a board chair, and a program officer. She would regularly remark to anyone and everyone, without being at all maudlin, that she planned to “die at her desk.” This is not to say that she did it all, although Barbara kept the staff size very small relative to the size of the foundation’s assets. In the first two years of the foundation, there were fewer than 10 staff who were responsible for over $100 million in annual grantmaking. This lean staff size made it all the more important for Barbara to surround herself with a trusted set of talented colleagues who also served many roles at once and had a great deal of responsibility, managing large and complex grant portfolios.

She hired a small brain trust of expert practitioners. On the program side, Dana Bourland joined in 2012 to develop and run the Environment Program; Donna Lawrence and then Tana Ebbole were early leaders of the Poverty Program. Betsy Krebs joined in 2014 and was promoted to vice president in 2016. Kevin Lee joined the foundation in 2015 to advise the Medical Research Program. To help her manage the assets and the operations, she brought in Goldman Sachs banker Gerald McNamara as chief investment officer and April Freilich, who had been an associate of Jeffry Picower, as chief operating officer. While Barbara is certainly an outsize figure in this story, the foundation’s success is every bit a testament to these leaders and their teams, which after a decade stood at 48 people.

The foundation continued to sharpen its strategies over the years, increasingly focusing on racial and environmental justice, listening carefully to the people who would be most affected by JPB’s grantmaking, and deepening its investments in organizations working on the root causes of poverty. The goal was to be a consistent funder of the causes the foundation cared about, but not to be too tied to a specific approach if it discovered new ways to be effective.

By most accounts, the foundation has been extraordinarily effective, achieving success in areas where it was often the largest donor but also an enthusiastic but silent partner, building deep professional and personal relationships with grantees and other foundations alike. At every step along the way the purpose was clear—improving the lives of people living in poverty across the U.S. who are underappreciated and underestimated, and who simply deserve better.

The program’s approaches sharpened over time. Initially focused on creating opportunities for people to move and stay out of poverty, by 2022 the Poverty Program goal shifted to “transform the systems that perpetuate social and economic inequities so that all people and communities could thrive and have their voices heard.”

Across the Poverty and Environment Programs, the foundation made large multi-year grants, often following a “hub and network” model—granting large sums to major organizations and smaller amounts to related groups suggested by grantees. Collaborating with other funders where possible, JPB nevertheless often found that it was the largest or even the only funder of a strategy. Due to Barbara’s commitment to maintaining a small staff and the need to distribute substantial funds, JPB frequently funded national organizations with strong local networks and intermediaries familiar with smaller community-based groups. The leadership and program staff at JPB placed a priority on listening and learning from experienced leaders, especially Indigenous communities, people of color, and women.

As the endowment and grantmaking amounts increased, JPB hired more staff and developed new systems for supporting a nationwide grantmaking strategy. The programs responded to societal changes and the needs of grantees by, for example, increasing funding for civic engagement during the 2016 and 2020 election years, providing emergency relief to communities after devastating weather events made more intense due to human-caused climate change, starting a fund to support the organizational health of its grantees, addressing the impact of COVID-19 on low-income communities, and responding to attacks on immigrant communities as well as to uprisings in support of racial justice.

I have a sense that Barbara might not be thrilled with this chapter, which may in itself reveal a lot about her. One of Barbara Picower’s defining traits is her reluctance to seek the spotlight. She often told grantees not to thank her, as it was she who felt grateful to them. Yet any exploration of The JPB Foundation should start with its founder—her personality, her working style, and her deep commitment to the individuals and communities supported by JPB over the years.

Started small and worked hard

Given the small size of the program staff during the early years, Barbara created specialized advisory committees to help guide the foundation. These committees were made up of experts in the field, signaling her seriousness about the work, and they provided her with access to extremely good thinking. She drew freely on the wisdom and expertise of these leaders as well as her leadership team to help guide her, but the final decisions the foundation made were invariably Barbara’s in her capacity as founder, donor, president, and board chair.

She is an indefatigable learner, burying herself in the minutiae of the work. According to longtime board member Susan Frunzi, “Barbara worked every day,18 hours a day, seven days a week, and became a very serious force in philanthropy.” Barbara was familiar with the work of the Poverty Program area from her years running The Picower Foundation, but the Environment Program work was new to her, requiring extra study. The medical research activities were necessarily technical and specialized, but she made up for what she lacked in formal science education with hard work, as she collaborated with grantees to push the boundaries of science in research around Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and Parkinson’s disease. As the molecular geneticist, JPB advisor, and grantee Dr. Jeffrey Friedman put it, “She’s not intimidated or abashed about what other people might think of her. And she works tirelessly, absolutely running herself ragged to make it successful.”

Highly engaged

Dr. Friedman’s observation is no exaggeration. Barbara’s work style at JPB would set her apart from most foundation presidents or donors. For years, she read every grant proposal, hand-edited every board docket and Advisory Committee memo, and attended every meeting possible. Jeff Bradach, the co-founder and former managing partner of the Bridgespan Group, recalls the very early days of the foundation when his firm was brought in to advise on program strategies. Bridgespan was in the process of conducting discovery interviews with field experts when Barbara noted that the interviews were not on her calendar. “I said, ‘No, we’re doing the interviews and then we’ll come back to you,’” Bradach recalls, smiling. “And she said, ‘That makes no sense because I’m the one who has to make the decisions.’” Needless to say, she attended the interviews.

Modest

The JPB Foundation is known—if it’s known at all—for being a modest foundation, far more interested in results than in accolades. The foundation did not employ a communications staff member during the first 10 years, its simple website has not fundamentally changed since it was launched in 2012, and under Barbara the foundation had virtually no social media presence. Some might wonder if Barbara has maintained a low profile because of the withering scrutiny of the Madoff scandal, but her reluctance to take center stage is genuine. As Geoffrey Canada, who was an early grantee of The Picower Foundation, notes, “You would have had no idea that Jeffry and Barbara had the kind of resources they had. Barbara was as low key and circumspect before Madoff as she was after.” Attempts to present her with awards were almost always declined. “Barbara was notoriously unwilling to do anything that honored her,” reflects Cecile Richards, former president of Planned Parenthood of America and a JPB board member from 2018-2023. “Barbara was never looking for the limelight. She felt that you should just do the work, and the work would speak for itself.”

Honest, direct, and she trusts her gut

Perhaps the trait that distinguishes itself more than any other has been Barbara’s ability to build personal relationships with staff and grantees and then provide them with the resources they needed to succeed. She treated the foundation like a family, especially in the early years, when the entire staff of the multi-billion-dollar organization could fit around a single conference table.

Grantees would become close friends of hers, and a few would eventually be asked to join the board after they left their organizations. Jeff Bradach recalls Barbara remarking, “Doesn’t it make sense that the people I think most highly of should serve on my board?”

Jonathan F.P. Rose, a developer of affordable housing and an advisor to the Environment Program, adds that Barbara’s gut was usually correct. “She could sense when she was being hustled,” he notes. “She has a real bullshit detector and a strong intuition about who the authentic people were who could make a difference in the world. She was backing ideas and people. And if you look at the work as a curated body of worldview, it’s amazing.”

Barbara’s intuition and faith in people certainly showed when one evening at dinner she asked Deepak Bhargava to take over the foundation to which she had devoted nearly every waking hour of the past 10 years. Barbara insists that the decision was a spontaneous one. “I looked at him and thought ‘He’s the person,’” she reflects. This combination of hard work, intuition, trust in others, willingness to be a leader or a partner depending on the situation, and a deep commitment to helping others has animated JPB since its founding. This approach to philanthropy was passed on to the staff, who brought these values to life in the grantmaking.