Kathy Goldman,who devoted her career as a civic leader to establishing food banks,pantries and free breakfast and lunch programs in public schools to sustain low-income New Yorkers,has died. She was 92.
Food Bank For New York City CEO Margarette Purvis (L) and founder Kathy Goldman in 2019.Getty
Goldman was determined to confront the collective indifference that she felt had contributed to the Holocaust. Over five decades she worked with many collaborators to successfully lobby for federal subsidies like food stamps and nutrition assistance for women,children and infants;create partnerships between corporate providers of provisions and local communities;and expand the mandate of anti-hunger programs to include help with housing,health care,education and other needs.
In 1980,she founded the Community Food Resource Centre,a food pantry,as a buffer against stricter eligibility requirements for welfare. Three years later she helped organise what is now the Food Bank for New York City,which served scores of soup kitchens and food pantries around the city. She was the centre’s executive director until she retired in 2003.
In 1984 she started the Community Kitchen of West Harlem,an innovative program that not only offered food,but also helped the hungry with other needs,including housing and health care. After renovations to the dining area,“when a 10-year-old boy exclaimed,‘It’s just like McDonald’s!’ Goldman ‘considered it the greatest compliment of all time coming from a kid,’” Lana Dee Povitz wrote inStirrings:How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice (2019).
In the early 1990s,she persuaded the city to open school cafeterias in Chinatown and Harlem in the evenings to serve dinners to older adults.
A Food Bank truck lies outside the Food Bank for New York City’s Annual “Can-Do” Awards Gala,2006Getty
“She was the single most important voice fighting hunger in New York for 50 years and the first to focus on food in schools,which resulted in literally thousands of kids actually eating the food as opposed to throwing it out,” Fran Barrett,Gov. Kathy Hochul’s interagency coordinator for nonprofit organisations,said.
In 2002,Goldman was invited to carry the Olympic torch for a quarter-mile in New York and in 2012 was honoured by President Barack Obama at the White House as a “champion of change” for helping to reduce hunger in America.
After she retired from the food centre,she and Agnes Molnar founded Community Food Advocates in 2009 to lobby for universal school lunch and other government strategies to meet the nutritional needs of Americans.
As Goldman often said:“Tomorrow morning,if the will were there,we would not have to have any hunger. There’s no dearth of food.”
Community Activist Kathy Goldman speaks onstage at the Food Bank For New York City’s Can-Do Awards,2013.Getty
Catherine Vera Friedman (she later changed her name to Kathryn,after the actress Kathryn Grayson) was born on January 15,1932,in the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Her mother,Ila (Goldman) Friedman,was a writer who founded a Hungarian women’s magazine. Her father,Samuel,was a cabinet maker and secretary-treasurer of his union.
After graduating among the first group of girls admitted to the Bronx High School of Science,three blocks from her home,she became the first in her family to go to college,studying film at New York University then briefly attending City College and Hunter College. In 1986,she earned a master’s degree in urban studies from Queens College of the City University of New York.
In 1949,she travelled to Budapest,where she worked as a translator at the World Youth Festival;at college she joined the Labor Youth League,which had been established by the Communist Party (although she later said she balked at the red flag-wavers’ self-importance,dogmatism and denigration of women);and took courses in Marxism and black history at the Jefferson School of Social Science,once described in The Times as “the principal training centre for Communists and Communist sympathisers in this city.”
She and her husband,Jack Goldman,were active in the Urban League’s campaign against racial discrimination in housing. She also joined a group of white middle-class parents who supported school desegregation.
She and her husband divorced in 1974. In addition to her daughter,she is survived by her sons,Joseph and Robert Goldman;five grandsons,and two great-grandsons. Most of her relatives who remained in Europe after her parents immigrated were killed in the Holocaust.
“I was really raised to believe that if more people had said something,then the Holocaust would not have happened,” Ms. Goldman’s daughter quoted her as saying.
“If there would have been a fightback,it would have been mitigated. I believe that ’til this day. You can do something. You can make a difference,you can make a change.”
The New York Times
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