In the early 1960s, when he was in his mid-70s, attorney Harold Terry Clark set about to reinvigorate the grantmaking of the Cleveland Foundation. Clark had been a foundation board member during the 1940s and ’50s, but his reputation as the city’s most influential philanthropist came from another involvement. When Leonard C. Hanna Jr. died on October 5, 1957, he left Clark in charge of his trust fund. Hanna, scion of a Great Lakes iron ore- and coal-shipping fortune, had instructed that the fund be liquidated within five years of his death, with $33 million to be given immediately to the Cleveland Museum of Art. That left Clark, who had been Hanna’s personal attorney, with more than $40 million to distribute.
A member of the prominent Cleveland law firm of Squire, Sanders & Dempsey (which he had joined in 1906 after graduating from Harvard Law School and left in 1938 to start his own practice in order to have more time to devote to community pursuits), Clark had interested a group of civic leaders in helping him organize a natural sciences museum for Cleveland in 1920. He later became president of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and of the art museum. With both museums located in University Circle, the home of the city’s most prestigious cultural, educational and medical institutions, it is not surprising that a first-time federation of Circle institutions aimed at turning the area into a veritable Acropolis was the beneficiary of one of the first Hanna grants made by Clark.
Clark’s interest in urban redevelopment was further spurred by a speech given in the early 1960s by Adolph W. Schmidt, president of the A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust in Pittsburgh. Schmidt had described the role of the Allegheny Conference on Community Development in rebuilding an area of downtown Pittsburgh known as the Golden Triangle. The Allegheny Conference’s “full mobilization of philanthropy,” according to Schmidt, had been one of its outstanding accomplishments. Harold Clark decided that he would try to engineer a similar miracle in Cleveland.
And so it was that, on November 8, 1961, the board of the Cleveland Foundation, in conjunction with the Hanna trust and four other area foundations, submitted to the Ford Foundation a formal grant request entitled “A Proposal for the Greater Cleveland Association of Foundations.” The document outlined four distinct roles for the proposed association, whose operating expenses were to be paid for by income from the Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. Special Purpose Fund that Clark had established earlier that year at the Cleveland Foundation with a $1 million gift. The purpose of the new fund—to help the community develop a “sound, efficient and forward-looking charitable program”—was couched in the broadest possible language so as to avoid raising alarm.
In the interim, Clark had persuaded the leaders of the city’s largest philanthropies to support his vision of creating a new foundation whose mission would be “to encourage research on and solutions of community social welfare problems of Cleveland, Ohio and its vicinity; to establish priorities for community action thereon; to make grants for research, pilot, experimental and other projects toward the solutions of such problems; and to encourage wise use of private philanthropic funds.”
Like everyone connected with the creation of the Greater Cleveland Associated Foundation (GCAF)—a name change made to eliminate the presumption that the four smaller foundations that had endorsed GCAF were prepared to carry out the above-mentioned mission—Clark harbored large ambitions for the new philanthropy. In the end, no one’s expectations were to be fully met. Yet the demonstration project he initiated must be judged a success in that it re-established a tradition for philanthropic leadership of metropolitan affairs that today inspires not only the work of the Cleveland Foundation (with which the Greater Cleveland Associated Foundation eventually merged), but also that of most other big-city community foundations. Learn more about GCAF’s impact.