Since 1963, Barra has aimed to strengthen communities by providing risk capital to nonprofits in the region to test new ideas, assess results, learn from them, and share those lessons to inspire transformative and equitable change. Our mission encompasses advancing knowledge through support of early-stage, bold approaches in the areas of Arts & Culture, Education, Health, and Human Services, focusing on improving the lives of under-resourced individuals, families, and communities.
The Catalyst Fund is Barra's core grantmaking program, designed to provide early-stage dollars that enable organizations to experiment with new ways of addressing emerging or persistent problems. This program seeks to support social impact organizations and leaders by offering not just funding, but also thought partnership to foster risk-taking, hypothesis testing, and assumption challenging. The grants facilitate the testing of ideas that, although they might not currently work, have the potential for outsized impact and the creation of thriving, equitable communities. The Catalyst Fund favors proposals that are early-stage and represent a significant departure from existing practices; are informed by those most affected by the issue at hand; can potentially transform a field, sector, region, or system; address timely and precisely defined problems or opportunities; create outsized impact for communities, particularly in under-resourced areas; and are rooted in shifts in underlying assumptions, perhaps driven by new evidence or shifts in cultural/social awareness.