Determining the doable was an early priority of the individual chosen after a national search to succeed Barbara Haas Rawson as the seventh director of the Cleveland Foundation. At age 60, Homer Clark Wadsworth (see video) was one of philanthropy’s most respected and progressive veterans. He devoted his first few years on the job to sizing up options before he “kicked up any dirt” by recommending major new programs to the foundation’s board. As president of the Kansas City (Missouri) Association of Trusts and Foundations from 1949 to 1974 (and for most of his 25 years there its sole program officer), Wadsworth maneuvered quietly and patiently behind the scenes to create opportunities to leverage positive change. He saw no reason to abandon this approach when he took up the reins of leadership at the Cleveland Foundation in January 1974.

Wadsworth went on to win board support for many of the initiatives that underpinned what Clevelanders came to think of as the city’s renaissance in the 1990s. During his decade-long tenure, the Cleveland Foundation helped the community peacefully prepare for desegregation of the public schools, return from municipal default, revitalize Playhouse Square, reclaim its industrialized waterfront as a recreational asset, strengthen and expand its arts institutions, and develop the capacity to analyze and act on regional and national socioeconomic trends. As had been the case in Kansas City, the ingredients of Wadsworth’s success as a change agent here were hard data and research, strategically planted suggestions, deftly timed seed grants, keen instincts for negotiation and his personal charm. He credited his accomplishments to “two-pants suits—because you have to out-sit people.”

Born in Pittsburgh in 1913, Wadsworth was at heart a hard-eyed realist whose world view had been shaped by tragedy. When Homer was eight, his father, a tugboat captain, died from the lingering effects of an accident that had crushed his leg. Homer and his sister grew up in a tough Pittsburgh neighborhood populated by low-income African Americans and whites. This experience contributed to his forward-looking social views, as did his awareness of his mother’s daily struggle to raise two children on limited resources, the calamitous effects of the Depression on average families, the woeful inadequacies of the public healthcare system to which his father had fallen victim, and the existence of racial and class prejudices against residents of poor neighborhoods such as his.

Graduating in 1935 from the University of Pittsburgh, Wadsworth pursued doctoral studies in philosophy and history at the University of Chicago and the University of Minnesota, respectively. In 1937, he took a summer job as an administrative assistant to Pittsburgh’s reform-minded mayor, Cornelius D. Scully. Wadsworth never returned to his graduate studies. He worked as executive secretary for the city planning commission before serving as a naval officer World War II. After the war, he worked for the City of Pittsburgh for eight years, most notably as head of the department of parks and recreation. In the late 1940s, he briefly served as vice president and dean of the New School of Social Research in New York before moving on to Kansas City, whose postwar revitalization he helped to bring about.

Wadsworth also influenced philanthropic policy and professional standards at the national level, especially in his promotion of the principles of accountability and full reporting. He helped to create the Council on Foundations, Independent Sector, and the Foundation Center’s network of regional libraries and later served as either a board member of, or a trusted adviser to, these influential advocacy and support organizations. Even after retiring from the Cleveland Foundation in 1983, he extended philanthropy’s reach, as a consultant on the creation or development of community foundations in Puerto Rico and St. Croix in the Virgin Islands.

Recognizing his pioneering contributions to the field, his peers deemed Wadsworth “the senior statesman in American philanthropy,” “one of the giants of the foundation field,” and “probably the most widely loved and respected figure in American philanthropy today.” “Ask anyone to name the top 10 most significant leaders in the field,” Brian O’Connell, the founding president of Independent Sector, once observed. “The lists would all be different, but Homer would be on them all.”

Read an extended profile of Homer C. Wadsworth, who died in 1994 after losing a heroic battle with lung cancer at the age of 81.