Board of Directors

…o;s social service agencies. In April 1914, the council asked her to become its founding president. Later that year she requested that the Cleveland Foundation conduct a speedy study of how to strengthen the city’s relief effort. Sherwin joined the foundation’s board in 1917, resigning seven years later to assume the presidency of the National League of Women Voters in Washington. × Malcolm L. McBride Board: 1917–1941…

Indispensable Civic Roles

…horities. But Carter’s unpaid and time-consuming leadership of Cleveland Homes should also be acknowledged as part of the Cleveland Foundation’s record of accomplishment. Convener: Establishing a Groundbreaking Interracial Forum 1964 Presbyterian minister Bruce W. Klunder died while protesting the construction of three public elementary schools that Cleveland’s civil rights community believed would perpetuate a system of segregated and inferior…

Dorothy Ruth

…nt out grant notification letters and processed each of the hundreds of scholarships given to deserving college students over four decades, personally double-checking that the students received their checks. In 1972, Dorothy Ruth Graham—she married late in life—established the Dorothy and Helen Ruth Fund at the foundation with a gift of $1,000. In part to honor the memory of her mother, Ruth contributed from $700 to $1,000 saved from her modest…

Donald and Ruth Weber Goodman

…of Cleveland, he was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia, a rare and particularly aggressive form of cancer. Instead of chemotherapy, doctors at UH’s Ireland Cancer Center decided to treat Dr. Goodman with Mylotarg, a drug that had received Federal Drug Administration approval only five months prior. After 30 days of grueling treatment, during which time he received 19 transfusions of whole blood, Donald Goodman was declared cancer free….

Belle Sherwin

…ntire system running out of funds, Sherwin asked the Cleveland Foundation’s survey director Allen Burns, who was a member-at-large of the welfare council, to consider commissioning a study of how to strengthen the city’s relief effort. The foundation’s Survey Committee approved this request, and Burns hired Sherman C. Kingsley, director of the Elizabeth McCormick Memorial Fund of Chicago, and Amelia Sears, welfare director for Cook County,…

Russell R. Gifford

…Ohio Gas Company, becoming president of East Ohio Gas in 1989, then moved to CNG Energy Services as president in 1994. Gifford served as chair of the Greater Cleveland Growth Association and North Coast Harbor Inc. He was a trustee of Cleveland Tomorrow, Greater Cleveland Roundtable and University Hospitals, and served on the boards of the Greater Cleveland Chapter of the American Red Cross, Baldwin Wallace College, Urban League of Greater…

Steven A. Minter

…ious foundation directors Homer C. Wadsworth and James A. Norton. Minter deepened the foundation’s involvement with what he came to call the “enduring issues” of public education, jobs, housing and health care—sectors whose deficiencies and inefficiencies significantly affected the well-being of the region’s poor and minority citizens, from whose numbers he had risen. And, by stimulating the board to approve large-scale commitments to priority…

J. Kimball Johnson

…o work, and Johnson’s managerial skills attracted attention in Washington, D.C. In 1937, he was recruited to become a field office manager for the Social Security Administration. During World War II, he served as regional chief of field operations for the country’s manpower mobilization effort. After the war, he was tapped to head a five-state regional office that administered all of the programs then operating under the auspices the Social…

Reforming Public School Governance

…Michael R. White’s request that he co-chair the Mayoral Commission on School Governance in 1996. The Cleveland Foundation had a long tradition of leading efforts to improve the public schools, and the foundation’s seventh chief executive was personally devoted to education reform. During the first three years of Minter’s tenure, the foundation had stepped forward to make the lead commitment to a $16 million philanthropic-corporate partnership…

Emergency Aid to African-American-Run Hospital

Forest City Hospital, a 100-bed general medical center built by a group of African-American physicians who wanted to practice in a hospital free of race restrictions, survived its difficult first year of operation with the help of the foundation’s $35,000 emergency grant. Its financial footing regained, Forest City served the residents of Cleveland’s far east side for 20 years. When the hospital closed, its assets were transferred to the new…