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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Vestal: Barbieri and Smith are putting their money where their values are

This 2014 photo shows Don Barbieri and Sharon Smith, managers of the charitable foundation Smith-Barbieri Progressive Fund, shortly after they announced they had sold the Park Tower Apartments in downtown Spokane to a California company that specializes in providing affordable housing to seniors and the disabled. (Colin Mulvany / The Spokesman-Review)

Not long after Don Barbieri and his partner, Sharon Smith, moved into the beautiful top floor of their Upper Falls condo project on the Spokane River, they lost one of their favorite neighbors.

The People’s Clinic – a low-income health care service run by the Washington State University nursing school – closed in 2008 after 10 years. One of the clinic’s locations was at the YWCA, just down the riverbank from the condo, and they had been supporters of its mission to serve Spokane’s neediest citizens.

“Then it closed,” Barbieri said, “and there wasn’t a replacement in sight.”

Smith said, “We thought about it a lot after they closed. Where are the people going? Well, the reality is they’re going nowhere.”

Two years later, the couple – retired, connected, wealthy – made a decision that has been paying dividends across the region. They started the Smith-Barbieri Progressive Fund, a charitable foundation that has focused its grants on programs to help the region’s poor residents with health care and social services.

The fund made its first grants in 2011, and has donated more than $2 million to organizations around the region, from food banks and senior centers to Big Brothers and the YWCA. Its commitments range from large – a pledge of a half-million dollars for a new Planned Parenthood center – to small – helping a school buy soccer goalposts.

Naturally, health care has been one of the fund’s priorities. Among the foundation’s grantees is a $100,000 WSU Health Sciences initiative to create a novel community outreach program centered at the Spokane campus – an interdisciplinary project targeting “healthy housing” and related health disparities among children in the East Central neighborhood.

That project is part of a widespread effort on the Health Sciences campus to address community health, including a new planned teaching clinic. Patricia Butterfield, a nursing professor and dean emerita at WSU, said the work is an extension of the spirit and mission of the People’s Clinic.

“Losing the People’s Clinic was so heartbreaking for me,” Butterfield said. “I always hoped it would rise again in a broader format.”

The foundation has no overhead or offices or staff – Barbieri and Smith do everything. Their grant application process is streamlined and quick, compared to many similar organizations.

“When we communicate with (the foundation) we communicate directly with Sharon Smith or Don Barbieri,” said Lisa Diffley, the executive director of the Women & Children’s Free Restaurant, which the fund has contributed to for several years.

Speeding up the application process was a key goal for the fund.

“These service providers are continually fighting for funding, while they are also serving the most vulnerable people in the community,” Smith said. “We do our due diligence, and we make quick decisions.”

Barbieri’s name is among the most well-known in Spokane, as a developer, businessman and civic leader. He also has served on various boards and in leadership roles in the community, including as president of the Chamber of Commerce in his role as a WSU regent.

In 2004, he made a run for Congress as a Democrat. He lost that race to Cathy McMorris Rodgers – it was the first of six commanding victories in a row for McMorris Rodgers – but he said the campaign was a pivotal experience. He and Smith had both retired – him as the CEO of Red Lion Hotels and her from 25-year career in hotel marketing – and were looking for the next path.

“That race was probably the best 18 months I have ever spent, fully immersing myself into what people’s lives are all about … and trying to search deeply for what would be my contributions to the issues I saw,” he said.

The foundation has actually existed since the 1980s, as a way of managing affordable housing projects. But in 2010, Barbieri and Smith injected some of their own cash to create a $2.6 million fund, and started handing out grants the next year, with a focus on poverty, affordable housing and health care.

One of the things that’s unusual about it is how frank Smith and Barbieri are about who’s involved and what their values are. Their names and political leaning are right there in the foundation’s name. This, in an age when political organizations abuse the tax code, pretending to be charitable or educational groups in order to reap nonprofit tax status and obscure the names and goals of donors, while operating almost completely as political actors.

Smith and Barbieri are clearly supporting causes they believe in, and they do get involved in politics. But the bulk of foundation’s efforts are directly charitable. More than 50 regional organizations have received grants from the fund.

Last year, the foundation commissioned polling in Spokane on a wide range of issues. Part of the goal was to help set the organization’s priorities, or to identify community priorities that it could tackle.

The poll included 622 interviews in the county at large (3.9 percent margin of error) and 390 in the city of Spokane (4.5 percent margin). The attitudes expressed by city residents support Barbieri’s contention that the city of Spokane “is turning progressive” – high levels of support for the social safety net, public funding of campaigns, abortion rights and other typically liberal positions.

One of the poll results resonated: 87 percent of county residents polled said they agreed that “Working people who are sick or have sick children should be able to take paid sick days.”

That level of support – repeated in other questions on the same topic – helped guide the foundation’s grant to the Spokane Alliance, the coalition of labor and civic groups, and its efforts in support of a citywide policy requiring businesses to offer paid sick leave. The City Council was poised to take up the matter, but has sidelined it.

The couple have also been longtime supporters of Planned Parenthood. When the Pullman clinic was targeted by an arsonist, the foundation made a challenge grant of $20,000 to help rebuild, and contributions have nearly matched it.

“I don’t think there’s any better way to combat domestic terrorism than to simply rebuild and reaffirm the purpose and the mission,” Barbieri said.

Last week, the foundation announced it would donate $500,000 for the construction of a new Planned Parenthood center in Spokane. (They and the Harriet Cheney Cowles Foundation were the top donors).

Karl Eastlund, the CEO of the regional Planned Parenthood organization, said the couple has been an inspiration for Planned Parenthood, and that Smith, as a committed and passionate woman taking a leadership role, has been an inspiration and “a rock” for the organization’s staff.

In awarding grants, Smith and Barbieri look for ways to contribute to services that complement each other and to avoid redundancies. They don’t wait around for applications.

“We pick up the phone and call these organizations and say, ‘What are you working on?’” Smith said. “We make sure it’s on our radar.”

Shawn Vestal can be reached at (509) 459-5431 or shawnv@spokesman.com. Follow him on Twitter at @vestal13.