The Streisand Foundation

The Streisand Foundation

Barbra Streisand established the foundation in 1986, channeling the wealth generated by an unrivaled entertainment career spanning film, music, and directing. Long-time political advisor and Executive Director Margery Tabankin has served as the operational lead, stewarding the foundation's grant-making priorities through successive election cycles and philanthropic campaigns. The foundation's board includes Streisand, her husband James Brolin, and family friend and film composer Richard Baskin. The foundation deploys capital through invitation-only grants, primarily directed at progressive advocacy groups—its long-time alliance with the Clinton Foundation's climate initiatives is public record. Grant-making has concentrated on voter engagement, women's reproductive rights, environmental policy, and cardiovascular health research. The Barbra Streisand Women's Heart Center at Cedars-Sinai stands as a named, bricks-and-mortar commitment to gender-specific medical research. The foundation is strictly a grant-maker; it does not make program-related investments, take equity positions, or operate as a venture-philanthropy vehicle. Streisand's philanthropy extends beyond the foundation into two named institutes at UCLA — the Barbra Streisand Institute, which focuses on public policy and social justice, and a broader academic endowment. These entities operate adjacent to the foundation, creating a small ecosystem of Streisand-branded non-profits without a formal single-family-office structure to manage her personal balance sheet. Streisand's personal assets — including her Malibu oceanfront compounds and American folk art collection — sit outside the foundation's purview. The foundation's structural differentiator is its complete rejection of open applications. It operates as a closed-network advocacy funder, where the grantee list maps directly to the causes and relationships Streisand and Tabankin have cultivated over 50 years in public life. This is not diversified impact investing — it's conviction grant-making, executed quietly, with no external money and no published annual report beyond IRS filings.