Kathy Goldman, who devoted her profession as a civic chief to establishing meals banks, pantries and free breakfast and lunch packages in public colleges to maintain low-income New Yorkers, died on March 5 in Brooklyn. She was 92.
The reason for demise, in a hospital, was congestive coronary heart failure, her daughter, Julie Goldman, stated.
Combating malnourishment, Ms. Goldman was decided to confront collective indifference, which she felt had contributed to the Holocaust. Over 5 a long time she labored with many collaborators to efficiently foyer for federal subsidies like meals stamps and vitamin help for girls, youngsters and infants; create partnerships between native communities and company suppliers of provisions; and broaden the mandate of anti-hunger packages to incorporate assist with housing, well being care, schooling and different wants.
In 1980, she based the Group Meals Useful resource Middle, a meals pantry, as a buffer in opposition to stricter eligibility necessities for welfare. Three years later, she helped set up what’s now the Meals Financial institution for New York Metropolis, which has served scores of soup kitchens and meals pantries across the metropolis from the Hunts Level market within the Bronx. She was the middle’s govt director till she retired in 2003.
In 1984, she began the Group Kitchen of West Harlem, an revolutionary program that not solely provided meals but in addition helped the hungry with different wants, together with housing and well being care. After renovations to the eating space, “when a 10-year-old boy exclaimed, ‘It’s similar to McDonald’s!’ Goldman ‘thought-about it the best praise of all time coming from a child,’” Lana Dee Povitz wrote in “Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Motion for Meals Justice” (2019).
Within the early Nineties, Ms. Goldman persuaded the town to open faculty cafeterias in Chinatown and Harlem within the evenings to serve dinners to older adults.
“She was the only most necessary voice preventing starvation in New York for 50 years,” Fran Barrett, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s interagency coordinator for nonprofit organizations, stated by e mail, “and the primary to deal with meals in colleges, which resulted in actually hundreds of children really consuming the meals versus throwing it out.”
In creating federal faculty breakfast and summer time meals packages in New York, Ms. Goldman “employed individuals who had experience and acquired out of their manner,” stated Ms. Barrett, who had been considered one of her collaborators (together with Liz Krueger, who would grow to be a state senator, and Mary McCormick of the New York Group Belief).
In 2002, Ms. Goldman was invited to hold the Olympic torch for a quarter-mile in New York, and, in 2012, she was honored by President Barack Obama on the White Home as a “champion of change” for serving to to cut back starvation in America.
After she retired from the meals middle, she and Agnes Molnar based Group Meals Advocates in 2009 to foyer for common faculty lunch and different authorities methods to fulfill the dietary wants of Individuals.
As Ms. Goldman usually stated: “Tomorrow morning, if the desire had been there, we’d not need to have any starvation. There’s no dearth of meals.”
In 2022, she moved to a retirement neighborhood in Sleepy Hole, N.Y.
Catherine Vera Friedman (she later modified her identify to Kathryn, after the actress Kathryn Grayson) was born on Jan. 15, 1932, within the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Jap Europe. Her mom, Ila (Goldman) Friedman, was a author who based a Hungarian girls’s journal. Her father, Samuel, was a cupboard maker and secretary-treasurer of his union.
After graduating among the many first group of women admitted to the Bronx Excessive Faculty of Science, three blocks from her house, she grew to become the primary in her household to go to school, learning movie at New York College then briefly attending Metropolis Faculty and Hunter Faculty. In 1986, she earned a grasp’s diploma in city research from Queens Faculty of the Metropolis College of New York.
In 1949, Ms. Goldman traveled to Budapest, the place she labored as a translator on the World Youth Competition; at school she joined the Labor Youth League, which had been established by the Communist Get together (though she later stated she balked on the pink flag-wavers’ self-importance, dogmatism and denigration of ladies); and took programs in Marxism and Black historical past on the Jefferson Faculty of Social Science, as soon as described in The Occasions as “the principal coaching middle for Communists and Communist sympathizers on this metropolis.”
She and her husband, Jack Goldman, had been energetic within the City League’s marketing campaign in opposition to racial discrimination in housing. She additionally joined a bunch of white middle-class dad and mom who supported faculty desegregation.
In 1966, Ms. Goldman and one other activist, Ellen Lurie, in contrast the studying check scores of each faculty within the metropolis and publicized them as proof that Black college students had been receiving an inferior schooling.
She and Evelina Antonetty organized to enhance South Bronx public colleges, growing a bilingual coaching initiative for adults by means of United Bronx Dad and mom and introducing a federally financed free summer time meals program for youngsters in 1971; she helped draft laws when this system was expanded nationally in 1979.
Ms. Goldman and her husband divorced in 1974. Along with her daughter, she is survived by her sons, Joseph and Robert Goldman; 5 grandsons; and two great-grandsons. Most of her kinfolk who remained in Europe after her dad and mom emigrated — her father from Slovakia and her mom from Hungary — had been killed within the Holocaust.
“I used to be actually raised to consider that if extra individuals had stated one thing, then the Holocaust wouldn’t have occurred,” Ms. Goldman’s daughter quoted her as saying. “If there would have been a battle again, it could have been mitigated. I consider that until today. You are able to do one thing. You may make a distinction, you may make a change.”
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