John Bare is the senior vice president of programs at The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, a family philanthropy investing more than $40 million annually in Georgia, Montana and around the country.

In this role, John provides the creativity and vision to animate the Blank family’s passions across a number of program areas, including education, parks and greenspace, early childhood development, the arts, childhood obesity and community development. John leads a team of eight and engages dozens of associates from the Blank Family of Businesses who are members of five committees that participate in the grantmaking for the Atlanta Falcons, Atlanta United and Mr. Blank’s other business interests.

John joined The Blank Family Foundation in 2004 and created the Foundation’s Speaker Series and Film Series and the programming for West Creek Ranch, a nonprofit retreat & conference center in Montana — all central to the Foundation’s commitment to spark civic action on issues of interest to trustees.

In the field of evaluation, John is a national leader in identifying and adapting innovative tools for social change strategies. John was part of a 2015-16 national advisory board for The Commons’ Risk Management Toolkit, and his 2009 Foundation Review article, “Philanthropy, Evaluation, Accountability, and Social Change,” challenges the field to differentiate accountability, which sets the ground floor for acceptable practices, from the complex, aspirational work required to advance social change.

John joined The Blank Family Foundation after seven years at The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, where he created the planning and evaluation department. At Knight, John created an indicators project to track more than 100 quality-of-life measures across 26 communities. In Knight’s journalism work, John directed the largest-ever study of training and professional development for U.S. journalists, and designed the Future of the First Amendment research project that assessed knowledge and attitudes of 100,000 students, nearly 8,000 teachers and 500 administrators and principals at U.S. high schools. In the arts, John directed one of the biggest discipline-specific arts consumer studies. The findings are published in the 2002 book, Classical Music Segmentation Study.

John is a former journalist and media consultant who holds a Ph.D. in mass communication research from the University of North Carolina. John is a photographer whose work is shown in North Carolina and Georgia and a songwriter.