Barbara Haas Rawson was a well-known volunteer active in Cleveland’s League of Women Voters, Citizens League and the PTA in her home suburb of Shaker Heights before she joined the staff of the Greater Cleveland Associated Foundation (GCAF) in 1962. Although her title was administrative assistant to GCAF’s director James A. Norton (a relative newcomer to the community), Rawson also functioned as Norton’s sounding board and local historian. When GCAF, which had focused on devising new solutions to addressing intractable urban problems, merged with the Cleveland Foundation in 1967, and Norton became director of the latter organization, he encouraged Rawson to come with him to help revive the half-century-old community trust.
As assistant director of the Cleveland Foundation, Barbara Rawson continued to serve as Norton’s closest confidante and indispensable right hand. She also took pains to make the foundation more accessible to new, small or grassroots organizations. She wanted to ensure that, as she once put it, “no good idea or person escaped.” If a community group lacked the skills to put together a credible grant proposal, Rawson helped draft it. “Okay, let’s assume you get the money. Now what are you going to do Monday morning?” she would prompt.
The question became celebrated around the office for its directness and simplicity. Indeed, Rawson took it upon herself to mentor the growing staff of program associates and played a significant role in sharpening their analytical abilities. Three of these young talents—Bruce L. Newman, Roland H. Johnson and Timothy D. Armbruster—went on to head foundations.
When Norton resigned to take on new challenges at the Ohio Board of Regents in mid-1973, Rawson stepped into the role of interim director and served in that capacity until the arrival of Homer Wadsworth the following summer. The first woman in the country to hold the top executive position at a community foundation, Rawson became a national role model.
Though her time at the helm of the Cleveland Foundation was brief, she left a lasting legacy in recognizing early on the potential of the decaying vaudeville and movie theaters located in downtown Cleveland’s Playhouse Square. Unlike the hard-headed pragmatists heading up the city’s corporate and political sectors who had written off the theaters as useless, she supported an 11th-hour campaign led by public school administrator Ray Shepardson and Junior League of Cleveland president Elaine G. Hadden to save these still-ornate representatives of the city’s grand architectural heritage.
Once the bulldozers had been called off, it was Rawson who convinced the foundation’s board to fund a master redevelopment plan for Playhouse Square, another important step in the rebirth of this key downtown district. Long before the restored Playhouse Square theaters helped to bring about a cultural renaissance in Cleveland and contribute to the city’s economic revitalization, she understood the value of public incentives in spurring private redevelopment. Barbara Rawson died in 1990, having demonstrated that her vision, courage and determination were second to none.