Barbara F. Lee
American philanthropist
Barbara Fish Lee (born July 3, 1945) is an American philanthropist. She founded and led the Barbara Lee Family Foundation and the Barbara Lee Political Office, both located in Cambridge, Massachusetts until winding down in 2024. Major targets of Lee's donations include Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art and Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. In May 2014, the magazine Boston listed Lee among Boston's Most Powerful Thought Leaders.
Early life
Barbara Fish was born on July 3, 1945, to Sidney and Ruth Fish. She was raised in a middle-class Jewish family in West Orange, New Jersey. Her father was a dentist and her mother a homemaker. In high school, she was a cheerleader and basketball player. Lee became a Girl Scout and ran for student government with the encouragement of her grandmother, a suffragist that instilled her early interest in politics.
Education
Lee graduated from the all-women Simmons College in 1967 with a bachelor's degree in Education and French Literature.
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This entry incorporates text from “Barbara F. Lee” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.