Learning Officer (BF

The Barr Foundation’s mission is to invest in human, natural, and creative potential, serving as thoughtful stewards and catalysts. As stewards, Barr nurtures and enhances vital community assets. As catalysts, the Foundation cultivates and advances the breakthrough ideas that will shape our collective future. Barr focuses on achieving impact as a constructive partner, willing to exercise leadership.

Based in Boston, the Foundation focuses regionally, and selectively engages nationally, working in partnership with nonprofits, foundations, the public sector, and civic and business leaders to elevate the arts and creative expression, advance solutions for climate change, and expand educational opportunity. Barr is one of the largest private foundations in New England with assets of more than $2.0 billion and a 2020 grantmaking budget of $95 million.

A set of core values defined by the Barr Foundation’s founding trustees expresses beliefs about what constitutes effective philanthropy and guides how the Foundation carries out its philanthropic mission. The Foundation is committed to strive for excellence, act with humility, adopt a long-term perspective, and embrace risk. Additionally, while each program is guided by distinct priorities and goals, Barr embraces a common set of approaches in all aspects of its work, namely flexibility and nimbleness, a broad range of tools, knowledge and learning, openness and transparency, and active collaboration.

The new role of Learning Officer, described below, will have responsibilities spanning the Foundation’s Learning and Evaluation and Sector Effectiveness teams. Barr’s Learning and Evaluation team works with our core program teams to help track progress and impact of our strategies and gather insights to inform our work and the field. Barr’s Sector Effectiveness team seeks to support knowledge, capacity, policies, and practices essential to the health and impact of the nonprofit and philanthropic sector.

Across all of this work, Barr seeks to learn from as well as to contribute to the field.

As our core program strategies mature, we aim to more clearly understand our impact and learning to date – and to demonstrate (and ideally contribute to) best practices in grantmaking. Learning and Evaluation and Sector Effectiveness provide key resources to the program teams, including support for learning internally across Barr and between Barr and the field.

The Learning Officer will report to Barr’s Director of Learning & Evaluation. Under her direction and in partnership with the Sector Effectiveness and program teams, the Learning Officer will play three primary roles:

• Support program teams in designing and implementing evaluations and applying the learning from those efforts.
• Engage with and manage a portfolio of grants with leading regional and national social sector infrastructure organizations advancing and strengthening the field (currently approximately $1.5 million per year).
• Work with all Barr teams to synthesize learning from internal and external efforts, and translate those lessons into practice at Barr.

Advancing learning and practice at Barr

• Support program teams in integrating and applying lessons and leading practices from across the social sector in philanthropy, nonprofit capacity building and effectiveness, and organizational development.
• Support the Director of Learning and Evaluation in developing, articulating, and implementing Barr’s overall approach and frameworks for learning and evaluation.
• Increase Barr’s internal capacity for learning through a variety of activities such as:
  • Supporting and building the capacity of program staff to gather, analyze, interpret, and visualize research and data relevant to program strategies.
  • Supporting program teams and Directors to develop RFPs/RFIs for projects that advance team learning agendas.
  • Identifying and onboarding evaluation partners, and cultivating successful collaborations between consultants, program teams, intermediaries, and our grantees.
  • Supporting and managing learning and evaluation projects to successful completion.
  • D…