The John and Daria Barry Family Foundation is one of those classic stealth family foundations — minimal website, maximum mystery. Its mission statement is a single line: “Committed to improving opportunities, with a focus on veterans, education and the environment.” Beyond that, it provides only several lines of description of what and how it funds. But it’s another reminder that in the philanthrosphere, we should never judge a foundation by its homepage.
Originally founded in 2014 as the Invisible Hand Foundation, the Barry Foundation reported nearly a half-billion dollars in assets in FY2023 and distributed close to $25 million. It’s also a foundation that has steadily grown its asset base in recent years. Its founders are Wall Street couple John Barry and Daria Becker Barry, owners in Prospect Capital Management, a sprawling investment advisory firm overseeing more than $11.8 billion. The Barrys split their time between New York City and South Florida.
Historically, the couple have written some of their biggest checks to places like the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education (over $4 million in 2023), the Inner-City Scholarship Fund (close to $3 million in 2023), and the Prostate Cancer Foundation. But one of their latest gifts also caught our eye. In August 2025, the Barry Foundation announced a $5 million gift to the Glaucoma Research Foundation in San Francisco, launching its Treatment Accelerator Initiative and seeding a broader campaign to push promising pathways for glaucoma research out of the lab and into the clinic.
The goal isn’t just to slow the devastating vision loss that glaucoma brings, but to restore sight. I recently spoke with Daria Barry — who’s among the millions living with glaucoma herself — about why she started giving back, how she and John balance their different philanthropic interests while still being active in business, the deeply personal forces behind their glaucoma work, and where she sees their philanthropy heading next.
An overview of the Barrys’ giving
John F. Barry is chairman and CEO of Prospect Capital Corporation and Prospect Capital Management. Daria Barry, meanwhile, joined PCM in 1998 and serves as head of administration and managing director. A Wellesley alumna who also attended MIT, Daria grew up humbly. But she says that as soon as she started working in business, even when things were tight, she and John felt compelled to give back.
When the couple started having kids, they quickly brought them into this philanthropic environment. “We taught our five children it’s better to give than receive. And I think we demonstrated that in our lives by helping families that were less fortunate than we were,” Daria said. She talked about taking less-privileged children on field trips to places like the Bronx Zoo and said that this sort of informal giving was ongoing and consistent.
As Prospect Capital started to soar, she and John decided to formalize their philanthropy and lean into the causes they believed in. “As you can see from our very sparse website, [our focus] is really threefold: education, veterans and the environment,” Daria said with a laugh.
In addition to annual multimillion-dollar support for the Foundation for Excellence in Higher Education and the Inner-City Scholarship Fund, they’ve also given gifts to SEO Seizing Every Opportunity, Seton Education Partners, and the Urban Assembly, which helps boost the performance of public schools. “Without education, people are nowhere,” Daria said. They also back the Barry Scholarship, a merit-based scholarship that identifies high-achieving students and funds their graduate education at the University of Oxford.
The couple’s interest in veterans, meanwhile, is spurred in part by Daria’s passion for history and her own family heritage. Her father served in World War II and landed in France on the second day of the Normandy landings. She spoke about having a strong sense of gratitude for those who serve.
The Barrys have underwritten the John and Daria Barry Foundation Precision Oncology Center of Excellence at the VA Tampa and VA Bay Pines in Florida. The effort sits at the intersection of two of their interests: supporting service members while accelerating medical innovation. The Department of Veterans Affairs, she noted, holds one of the most extensive longitudinal health datasets in the world, and leveraging that data responsibly could unlock breakthroughs in cancer and beyond. “We can help the veterans and we can help the medical community, together by sponsoring research in veterans’ hospitals.”
Grants have also touched veterans’ mental health organizations like Guardian Revival, as well as Women Veterans Legal Assistance Program, the only national program that focuses exclusively on the legal needs and challenges of women veterans.
The third pillar of their giving, the environment, is quieter but expansive, touching the Northeast, Florida and beyond. One of their daughters plays a hands-on role, working directly with land trusts to identify protection opportunities. Recent grants have gone to the Audubon Society, Connecticut Fund for the Environment, Everglades Foundation, and Greenwich Land Trust.
“How can I have glaucoma?” Daria Barry’s personal experience with the condition
When she was only in her 50s, Daria Barry was diagnosed with glaucoma, a chronic neurodegenerative eye disease that affects 80 million people worldwide, and about 4 million adults in the U.S. She says her first reaction was shock. “I was thinking, glaucoma, that’s like macular degeneration. That’s like cataracts. That’s what people who are in nursing homes suffer from. How can I have glaucoma?” she said.
Doctors told her that her condition would steadily progress and encouraged her to return for checkups two to four times a year; she obliged, even though she experienced no overt symptoms. By 2016, she was told that both of her optic nerves looked “scary” because of how much they had deteriorated. “That struck me as odd because I had zero symptoms,” she said.
She started with the normal glaucoma regimen including prescription eyedrops and a laser procedure to help the eye expunge aqueous fluid. By around 2018, she thinks she started to see some deterioration in her vision in her left eye, a timeline she meticulously tracked on an excel spreadsheet along with all other things glaucoma.
Over time, she tried almost every treatment and procedure available, only to become allergic to nearly every prescription eyedrop on the market. Despite the obstacles, Daria approached her condition with a mix of stoicism and humor, learning everything she could. “When you’re faced with potentially going blind, you leave no stone unturned,” she said.
Two organizations she connected with through her research became central to her journey: the Glaucoma Research Foundation (GRF) in San Francisco and the Glaucoma Foundation in New York, both of which the couple support.
Daria was particularly drawn to GRF’s CEO Tom Brunner, who joined the foundation in 2003 after a long career in the ophthalmic laser business. Brunner, who told me he developed one of the laser treatments for glaucoma, describes GRF as “the largest nonprofit in the world focused specifically on glaucoma” with a mission to cure the disease and restore vision. “We have a very strong focus on curing glaucoma and restoring vision loss to glaucoma. So that makes us somewhat unique,” Brunner said.
What also sets GRF apart, Brunner said, is its collaborative model. Scientists aren’t applying for grants — they are selected. Each initiative begins with a clear goal, followed by the assembly of a handpicked advisory board that identifies early-career researchers willing to work in genuine collaboration. The work doesn’t stop in the lab, either; the foundation’s aim is to move discoveries into patient care.
The Barrys’ transformational gift to the Glaucoma Research Foundation
The Barrys’ trust in Brunner and GRF translated into GRF’s largest gift ever, a $5 million donation to GRF’s Treatment Accelerator Initiative. The program targets the preclinical phase, a familiar choke point in medical research, where promising ideas often languish between lab discovery and clinical testing — in this case, delaying hope for millions living with glaucoma. It’s a critical step, but one which doesn’t always attract traditional grants or government funding. Without intervention, potential treatments risk stalling there indefinitely.
Daria described Brunner as “my go-to guy for every big decision I make with glaucoma giving,” both at GRF and beyond, noting that she frequently calls on him to demystify complex science, from mitochondrial dysfunction to stem cell research. GRF has also played a role in shifting the understanding of glaucoma itself. Long thought to be an eye-pressure disease, it is now recognized as a neurodegenerative disease, in the same family as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and ALS. That perspective, Daria said, underscores the broader impact of GRF’s work, which can inform research across multiple neurodegenerative diseases, not just glaucoma. Indeed, she says that when studying cases of glaucoma, scientists can actually see into the optic nerve and beyond into the brain.
“Glaucoma is the only neurodegenerative disease that first starts outside the brain. I find that fascinating,” she said.
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Looking ahead: Daria and John Barry’s philanthropic mindset
In the meantime, Daria’s own left eye continues to deteriorate, but she considers herself fortunate. “If I could freeze my eyesight right now, even though my left eye is deteriorating , I would do it. I would say I am the luckiest person in the world.”
Beyond their support for GRF and the Glaucoma Foundation, the Barrys also gave $5 million to launch the Barry Family Center for Ophthalmic Artificial Intelligence and Human Health at Mount Sinai. Quietly started in 2023, the center uses AI to detect glaucoma and other eye diseases earlier, while also flagging broader systemic health issues.
For now, Daria still spends most of her time helping run Prospect Capital alongside her husband. But she’s clear about where her heart is pulling her. If she had, as she puts it, a “magic wand” to erase the responsibilities of her day job, she’d devote herself entirely to glaucoma research. In that sense, she’s following a path not unfamiliar on Wall Street — think Michael Milken, who turned his own cancer diagnosis into a full-scale crusade, helping raise close to $1 billion through the Prostate Cancer Foundation since founding it in 1993.
Daria isn’t positioning herself as the next medical philanthropy mogul, though. She’s media shy by nature and would prefer not to draw attention to her giving. “That’s why our website is so plain vanilla,” she said, again with a laugh. While the foundation, as with many of those started by ultra-wealthy living donors, does make annual transfers to a donor-advised fund (more than $9 million in 2023), she’s adamant that the goal isn’t to stockpile charitable dollars. Instead, she said they are committed to solving problems in real time. “My husband and I feel very strongly that we want to disburse the funds while we are alive,” she said.
