Carr: From Business To Human Rights

He’s got one foot in Cambridge, a second in Idaho and a third in Afghanistan.

This seemingly multi-footed entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist is Gregory C. Carr, one of Harvard Square’s most quietly influential people.

As he walks around Harvard Square at a brisk clip that would exhaust any normal person, he points out the various projects and buildings he’s backed over the last decade, from the center that bears his name at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) to the empty parking lot at Zero Arrow St. that will soon be transformed into a 320-seat theater.

Since he graduated from KSG in 1986, he’s turned giving money away into a full-time career.

“This world is just so chock full of fabulous ideas,” he explains.

Carr says he just wanted to play a role in turning such ideas into reality, and so began the rapidly spreading empire of Carr’s benevolence.

He has a small whiteboard in his apartment on which he keeps track of what his Carr Foundation is doing around the world.

On the left, he’s scribbled a bunch of numbers and financial calculations; on the right, there’s a running list of projects he’s involved.

In Cambridge, Carr is building an elaborate theater and has donated the money to fund the Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights; in Idaho, in addition to purchasing the old Aryan Nations headquarters and donating it to a university, he’s given a natural history museum and a memorial to Anne Frank; and—as his latest challenge—he’s creating a radio station in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

And Carr is just getting started.

Broadway in Cambridge

On the desk in his office above Wordsworth on Brattle Street, Carr has piles of blueprints for his new Market Theater—a state-of-the-art complex to be located in the parking lot at the intersection of Mass. Ave. and Arrow Street.

The first iteration of the Market Theater, which opened in fall 2001 in Winthrop Square above Grendell’s Den, was considered the best thing in years to hit the Cambridge theater scene, which some say desperately lacks performing arts venues.

But that location lasted less than a year. Last May, Carr announced that he was leasing the space to a restaurant, Upstairs on the Square—formerly Upstairs at the Pudding—which will reopen this fall.

According to Carr, the rent Upstairs on the Square pays on the old Market space will go to the Carr Foundation’s philanthropic efforts.

While the Market’s closure seemed to some like a sign that Harvard students would be left with the American Repertory Theater (ART) as the only professional group in the area, Carr had a different idea.

He wanted to reopen the Market Theater in a brand new, technically sophisticated space—at a total cost of $21 million.

In addition to a 320-seat theater, the new building will house a theater-themed café and the Carr Foundation’s headquarters, as well as low-cost office space for non-profits, which Carr says is much needed in a city facing a space crunch where all property is extremely expensive.

“It creates a whole building full of synergy,” he says.

The building will also be Cambridge’s first “green building,” according to Carr, and will be heated with no fossil fuels. Instead, it uses a geothermic process where water is pumped up from below ground; in winter, heat is extracted from the water and released into the building, and in summer, the heat is removed from the building and absorbed into the water.

Carr says he hopes construction on the new Market complex will begin in early spring; the plans by Guy Grassi, who also designed the original theater, are essentially complete, and all that remains is approval by Cambridge.

Home of the Great Carr

Carr entered the technology boom early in 1987, when he co-founded telecommunications equipment manufacturer Boston Technology with an MIT engineer.

In 1995, Carr began to fuse his interests in technology with his passion for human rights, founding a company called Africa Online which tried to bring the Internet to developing countries, later including Mexico and China.

To help with this, he purchased Prodigy, one of the first commercially successful Internet services, from IBM in 1996.

In 1999, he sold his stock in Internet giant Prodigy Inc.—of which he had been CEO—before the dot-com industry took a tumble.

He explains that his business enterprises were a gateway to his desire to work in human rights and the arts.

“What was driving me was to be able to keep pursuing what interests me,” Carr says. “It was more of getting to a position of saying, ‘I can do this full-time.’”

Meanwhile, he “dabbled in some things,” pursuing two of his other passions by co-founding the Boston Book Review and learning film-making.

Carr says he needs a combination of intellectual challenge and pragmatic action to be content—something which he says he sees in Harvard students, with whom he has interacted through the Market Theater and through his involvement on the board of directors of the ART.

“The biggest thing that I see [in Harvard students] is the marriage of academic work and activist work,” he says. “If I just do one or the other, I feel like something’s missing.”

Harvard, says Carr, is one of the main reasons he works in Cambridge—a city he finds fascinating.

“I like this town,” he says. “There’s an extraordinary amount of talent, resources, and brains in this region.”

A Wide Reach

Carr’s donations have stretched from the plains of Idaho to the bustle of Harvard Square to wind-swept Afghanistan—and many places in between.

In 1999, he gave KSG $18 million to start the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.

Although Carr says he is still occassionally involved in projects with the Center, he says his goal with any project is to be heavily involved at first and then to gradually wean himself from day-to-day involvement.

“I’m very involved in the beginning, and then it gets handed off,” he says. “The idea is to empower people.”

“He’s an ‘idea man,’” says one of Carr’s employees, Kathryn E. Crewe. “He’s pretty hands-off and trusting.”

Carr’s initiatives have also heavily concerned his home state of Idaho, where he has invested in human rights, including his purchase of the Aryan Nations’ headquarters and its later transfer to a university, the nearby building of a human rights institute and the construction and dedication of an Anne Frank memorial.

Crewe has a mock Idaho license plate above her desk at the Carr Foundation.

Instead of the traditional slogan saying “Famous Potatoes,” it says “Idaho—The Human Rights State.”

And this, in some ways, is Greg Carr’s goal.

Crewe says Carr has become a widely recognized figure across the state for his philanthropy—what she calls a “hometown hero.”

“He’s definitely known as the human rights advocate there,” she explains.

And just this month, he opened a new natural history museum in Idaho, which he says is the largest museum in the state.

Rising to the Challenge

Carr, who tends to speak in generalities about even his most significant accomplishments, explains that he thinks enjoyable projects carry the most risks.

“You can certainly fail,” he says. “It’s good to be involved somewhere where there’s the risk of failure. I think all of the activities that we’re pursuing more or less fit that category.”

His newest and perhaps most daring adventure falls in Central Asia.

In November, he’ll fly to Afghanistan as part of his foundation’s efforts to construct a radio station in Kandahar.

Carr says he got involved in the Afghan project because of his long-term interest in the region’s politics—and jumped at the opportunity when the project was proposed to him.

“The whole issue of Islam...and how that society can embrace human rights has been on my mind for several years,” he says. “It’s a big, big question—can they, within their own culture, find the bridge to international human rights norms?”

The three Carr Foundation staff members in Afghanistan right now have been developing a women’s leadership center and preparing to launch an independent radio station in a country that has never previously had non-state-controlled media.

“[We’re] training Afghans to be journalists and to understand the value of a free press which is a new concept for them,” he says.

Last week, Carr flew to a conference in Virginia to discuss media and journalism issues in developing areas with two hundred people.

To carry out his projects, every morning, Carr wakes up early and spends a few hours at home on e-mail, corresponding with the projects he’s less actively engaged in.

He spends most of the rest of the day in meetings—with a break for running along the Charles River—and in the evenings, he says, when he doesn’t have other engagements, he spends his time reading and thinking.

“I’m happy to be home alone reading,” he says. Crewe says Carr is motivated by his quest for new and exciting projects.

“He’s constantly looking for an intellectual challenge,” she says.

His latest fascination?

“My new little passion these days is the Greeks,” he says, pointing to his recently acquired collection of Greek art and sculpture in his Cambridge apartment.

In addition to sponsoring a lecture series in conjunction with the the politically charged production of the Greek tragedy Children of Herakles—scheduled to go up in the ART in January—Carr’s desk at home is littered with plays by Euripides and biographies of Greek playwrights.

Carr says he is considering producing a film somehow connected with ancient Greek drama, continuing on his interest in filmmaking as a young student.

“It’s just a matter of waking up in the morning and having fun things to do,” he says.

—Staff writer J. Hale Russell can be reached a jrussell@fas.harvard.edu.