Foundation Of Billionaire Wu Donors Gave $1.5 Million to Boston Globe

The Boston Globe Media Partners LLC is a politically influential and for-profit corporate media firm, not a charitable organization or a “non-profit” institution. As the Boston Globe Media Partners LLC’s website, for example notes:

“Boston Globe Media is a…media company…Our multiple newsrooms and media brands are innovative leaders in digital and print media, connecting our…journalism with…a range of advertising solutions that reach more consumers than any other New England media brand.”

And, according to a Jan. 22, 2025 Boston Globe Media Partners LLC press release:

“Boston Globe Media's portfolio includes The Boston Globe, Globe.com, Boston.com, STAT, The B-Side, Globe Publishing Services, Globe Events, Studio/B, Boston Magazine, and the weekday news program Boston Globe Today on NESN and online...”

In addition, the for-profit Boston Globe Media Partners LLC media company (whose owner is Billionaire Boston Red Sox baseball team owner John W. Henry and whose CEO is Billionaire Henry’s wife, Linda Henry) also owns the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Yet between Oct. 15, 2021 and Nov. 18, 2022, the Barr Foundation of Boston Billionaires Barbara Hostetter and Amos Hostetter, gave 3 “charitable” grants, totaling $1,550,000, to Billionaire Boston Red Sox Owner Henry’s “Boston Globe Media Partners LLC,” according to the Barr Foundation’s Form 990 financial filing for 2023—without being required to pay any kind of gift tax to the municipal government of Boston (one of the largest U.S. cities to have never elected a Black man as its mayor).

Besides using their private “non-profit” Barr Foundation (whose total assets increased in fair market value from over $1.9 billion to over $2.6 billion between January 2023 and January 2024) to help fund Billionaire Henry’s Boston Globe Media firm (whose daily printed newspaper's average daily circulation in 2023 still then exceeded 50,000), Billionaires Amos and Barbara Hostetter also exercise an undemocratic special plutocratic political influence in Boston and Massachusetts by making campaign contributions to local and state politicians and giving Barr Foundation “charitable grants” to foundations (like the Boston Foundation and the Hyams Foundation) that help fund executive director salaries of politically-oriented NGOs; or by giving grants directly, itself, to the executive directors of various politically NGOs (like the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, Resist, the Center for Economic Democracy, the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, Alternatives for Community and Environment[ACE], etc.).

Between December 2015 and April 2025, for example, the campaign committee of now-Boston Mayor Wu deposited individual campaign contributions totaling $6,500, and also accepted an in-kind donation of $1,000 for "event-catering", from Amos Hostetter. And individual campaign contributions, totaling $6,000, and an in-kind donation of $1,000 for "event-catering", from Barr Foundation Chair Barbara Hostetter, between October 2016 and April 2025, were also deposited in the Wu campaign committee's bank account.

In addition, prior to Wu's November 2021 election (as Boston's first woman mayor to later use BPD officers to arrest 118 antiwar and Palestinian solidarity Movement demonstrators and bystanders on Emerson College's campus), the Boston Turnout Independent Expenditure PAC, which spent large amounts of the PAC money it collected in 2021 supporting Wu's 2021 mayoral campaign, also deposited in its bank account an individual $20,000 campaign contribution from Billionaire Amos Hostetter, according to data posted on the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Finance's website.

Since 2011 Billionaire Amos Hostetter and Barbara Hostetter have also helped fund the political office-seeking campaign committees of many other politicians in Massachusetts--a state which still fails to protect most Massachusetts tenants from being overcharged for the apartments they rent by real estate developers, corporate real estate firm investors and non-owner-occupant landlords, by failing to enact a state-wide rent stabilization or statewide rent control law.

Between Jan. 1, 2011 and April 8, 2025, for example, Amos Hostetter made 106 individual contributions, totaling $588,000, to local and state political campaign committees in Massachusetts; and Barbara Hostetter made 95 individual contributions, totaling $142,000, to local and state political campaign committees.

And between Jan. 1, 2023 and Dec. 31, 2023, the Hostetters’ private foundation also gave, for example over $1 million in “charitable grants” to the “non-profit” Boston Foundation (whose own assets exceed $1.6 billion and whose president is both a former Emerson College president and current Barr Foundation trustee), at least $615,000 to the Hyams Foundation, $925,000 to the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, $2,130,000 to the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, $800,000 to the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, $700,000 to the Center for Economic Democracy, $950,000 to Abundant Housing Massachusetts, $228,000 to Emerson College “to support Howlround”, $450,000 to Bikes Not Bombs, and nearly $1 million to the Alternatives for Community & Environment Inc. [ACE}; while, during the same period, gentrification and the level of economic inequality and number of homeless and economically impoverished individuals and families in Boston continued to increase.