After five years as president and chief executive of The Boston Foundation, longtime civic leader Lee Pelton announced on Thursday that he will step down later this year. Pelton has led the $2.6 billion foundation through a tumultuous half-decade, from the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the post-George Floyd racial reckoning to the second Trump term and its outsize impact on the region’s economy.
Since joining the foundation in May 2021, Pelton has centered its mission on addressing yawning economic disparities in Greater Boston. In an interview this week, he said he was inspired to take the job in part to address Boston’s racial wealth gap.
As the leader of one of the nation’s first and most influential community foundations, Pelton has focused on equity and expanded TBF’s portfolio to include affordable housing and emergency support to vulnerable communities. During his time, the foundation’s assets grew by nearly $1 billion, and the amount it distributes each year nearly doubled to more than $300 million.
And in the last year, as federal cuts gutted local nonprofits’ ability to deliver food and resources to immigrant populations and needy families, Pelton launched the foundation’s Meeting the Moment campaign, which has invested more than $9 million to provide food assistance and support immigrant service providers.
Now, after four decades in public service, Pelton said he is ready to forge a new path.
“I have enjoyed and loved every minute that I’ve had at The Boston Foundation, because it’s given me the opportunity to be in an organization whose purpose is to improve lives and strengthen communities,” said Pelton, who came to the job after a decade leading Emerson College. “It has been 45 years of really deep devotion, engagement, around-the-clock work. It has been, for me, a career that has been inspirational and full of purpose.”
He told staff that he plans to serve through the end of August.
Governor Maura Healey praised Pelton as a “transformative leader.”
Pelton, she said, was “a powerful example of what is possible when philanthropy brings people together and leans into tough problems.”
Born in the 1950s into a sharecropping family in Wichita, Kan., Pelton was raised in a home with no indoor plumbing until he was 6 years old. He said it was this early exposure to poverty that helped shape both his perspective and career.
“While my family was not poor by any extreme means, we struggled to make ends meet,” he said, and many members of his extended family “had a hard time finding resources to have food on the table every night. ... That’s what’s guided me in this work.”
Pelton first arrived in Boston in 1974 to attend Harvard College, where he earned a PhD in English literature. Over the next 40 years, he pursued an academic career as a professor and dean and eventually became president of Willamette University in Oregon, before returning to Boston to lead Emerson College in 2011.
During his decade-long tenure at Emerson, Pelton expanded the university’s footprint, both here and abroad, and broadened its commitment to the arts. He joined several prominent local boards — the Boston Arts Academy Foundation, the Boston Chamber of Commerce, GBH, and the Barr Foundation — and he was also vocal about the need for more diversity among university presidents. In 2020, he penned a widely circulated letter in the wake of George Floyd’s murder about his own experiences with racism, titled “America is on Fire.”
While Pelton has been willing to raise his voice on issues that move him, friends and colleagues call him a “quiet leader” who listens more than he talks. When he does speak, they say, he often drives the conversation in a direction that ends up leading the day.
And many said that in a time of need, Pelton is often the first person they call.
“There is no one quite like Lee Pelton,” Mayor Michelle Wu said. “In times of intense emergency and in times of bold imagination, he’s been one of the first calls and always the first to say yes.”
Pelton’s longtime friend Michael Curry recalled taking over the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers around the same time that Pelton started at The Boston Foundation. The pandemic was raging and devastating the predominantly poor Black, brown, and immigrant patients served by community health centers. Curry described a moment early in Pelton’s leadership at TBF that was echoed by many leaders who have come to rely on him for counsel, guidance, and, ultimately, financial support.
“Lee reached out to me,” Curry recalled, “and said, ‘Mike, what can I do?’”
That call, Curry said, led to an unprecedented effort — led by Pelton and Jim Canales at the Barr Foundation — to marshal $5 million from the city’s philanthropic community to support community health centers throughout the region. Pelton didn’t stop there, Curry said. Realizing that the collaboration was an opportunity to address underlying health disparities in Massachusetts, Pelton helped orchestrate the creation of the Health Equity Compact, which now has more than 100 leaders of color working to better advance health equity across the state. It’s just one of many examples, Curry said, of Pelton seizing an opportunity to make lasting change.
“That is Lee’s legacy as well,” he said.
Eastern Bank Foundation president and chief executive Rahn Dorsey has also kept Pelton on speed dial.
When he worked for then-Mayor Martin J. Walsh, Dorsey helped lead an effort to bring Boston into the My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, an Obama-era program that worked to support Black and Latino men and boys. Pelton, he said, “was one of my first calls and he was an immediate yes.”
Dorsey also recalled how Pelton picked up the phone during 2015’s Snowmaggedon and agreed to deploy Emerson’s plows to clear streets for a mile-wide radius around campus. Knowing Pelton was a willing partner meant that other university presidents would likely follow suit, Dorsey said.
“To say Lee Pelton was on board or that he was out front with us on something meant something.”
So it came as no surprise, Dorsey said, when Pelton was selected to lead The Boston Foundation. “In some ways, it wasn’t a shift. He’s such a versatile leader.”
When Pelton stepped into the job, he made a point to get out front on an issue he believed was the most pressing one facing the city: affordable housing. In 2022, TBF founded the Greater Boston Partnership to Close the Racial Wealth Gap, which aimed to address wealth disparities by encouraging homeownership. That effort has nearly hit its $25 million fund-raising goal, Pelton said, and has made it possible for 400 first-time homeowners to purchase homes.
“For me, it’s been a signature program for The Boston Foundation, and it’s changed the conversation within the organization about prioritizing housing and seeing it as something that is so essential to creating an equitable city,” Pelton said.
The Foundation’s research arm, Boston Indicators, has helped shape housing policy, including the MBTA Communities Act and moves to boost Accessory Dwelling Units. What’s more, Wu said, TBF has been a major backer of the City of Boston’s Acquisition Opportunity Fund, which has helped purchase more than 400 market-rate apartments for use as affordable housing.
And even as some companies have backpedaled on diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, Dorsey said, Pelton “was one of the leaders who said, we’re not going to let this happen.”
That persistence has been on display in board meetings of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, said president and chief executive Jim Rooney. Sitting at the table with some of the city’s most prominent business leaders, he said, “Lee wasn’t afraid to challenge perspectives and articulate a different” viewpoint.
”People respect his thoughtfulness when he digs into an issue or a situation,” Rooney continued. “Lee isn’t a reflexive reactor, he’s a thinker, he analyzes with empathy and tries to understand a situation in a comprehensive way.”
Curry, who considers Pelton both a friend and mentor, said there’s a saying often thrown around in his circles: “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” But in Pelton’s case, Curry said, he’s constantly pulling up new chairs and identifying potential leaders in the process.
“He’s put so many of us at the table to be part of the critical conversations of our time,” Curry said.
Pelton has also made the most of The Boston Foundation’s resources, said board chair Dwight Poler, strategically harnessing grantmaking, donor partnerships, research, convening, and advocacy “into a powerful flywheel, that when done intentionally can be really, really impactful.”
Poler said Pelton leaves the foundation in “great shape,” with record donor inflows and community investments, and with a succession plan underway.
Pelton said he still anticipates he’ll answer the call when needed, and fully intends to have a seat at the city’s power tables himself. But it might look different going forward. He’s hoping to write, mentor, and advise organizations and spend more time with family.
“I’m not going to give up my engagement in civic life, because that’s the through line for everything that I’ve done my entire life,” Pelton said. “But I hope now to be able to chart my own course going forward.”
Janelle Nanos can be reached at janelle.nanos@globe.com. Follow her @janellenanos.