Kathy Goldman, who trustworthy her occupation as a civic chief to setting up meals banks, pantries and loose breakfast and lunch methods in public faculties to maintain low-income New Yorkers, died on March 5 in Brooklyn. She was once 92.
The reason for loss of life, in a health center, was once congestive middle failure, her daughter, Julie Goldman, stated.
Ms. Goldman was once decided to confront the collective indifference that she felt had contributed to the Holocaust. Over 5 a long time she labored with many collaborators to effectively foyer for federal subsidies like meals stamps and diet help for girls, kids and babies; create partnerships between company suppliers of provisions and native communities; and increase the mandate of anti-hunger methods to incorporate assist with housing, well being care, schooling and different wishes.
In 1980, she based the Community Food Resource Center, a meals pantry, as a buffer towards stricter eligibility necessities for welfare. Three years later she helped prepare what’s now the Food Bank for New York City, which served ratings of soup kitchens and meals pantries across the town from the Hunts Point marketplace within the Bronx. She was once the middle’s govt director till she retired in 2003.
In 1984 she began the Community Kitchen of West Harlem, an leading edge program that no longer simplest presented meals, but additionally helped the hungry with different wishes, together with housing and well being care. After renovations to the eating space, “when a 10-year-old boy exclaimed, ‘It’s just like McDonald’s!’ Goldman ‘considered it the greatest compliment of all time coming from a kid,’” Lana Dee Povitz wrote in “Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice” (2019).
In the early Nineties, she persuaded the town to open faculty cafeterias in Chinatown and Harlem within the evenings to serve dinners to older adults.
“She was the single most important voice fighting hunger in New York for 50 years and the first to focus on food in schools, which resulted in literally thousands of kids actually eating the food as opposed to throwing it out,” Fran Barrett, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s interagency coordinator for nonprofit organizations, stated through e mail.
In growing federal faculty breakfast and summer season foods methods in New York, Ms. Goldman “hired people who had expertise and got out of their way,” stated Ms. Barrett, who were one in every of her collaborators (along side Liz Krueger, who would change into a state senator, and Mary McCormick of the New York Community Trust).
In 2002, Ms. Goldman was once invited to hold the Olympic torch for a quarter-mile in New York and in 2012 was once commemorated through President Barack Obama on the White House 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 Community Food Advocates in 2009 to foyer for common faculty lunch and different executive methods to fulfill the dietary wishes of Americans.
As Ms. Goldman frequently stated: “Tomorrow morning, if the will were there, we would not have to have any hunger. There’s no dearth of food.”
In 2022, she moved to a retirement neighborhood in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y.
Catherine Vera Friedman (she later modified her title to Kathryn, after the actress Kathryn Grayson) was once born on Jan. 15, 1932, within the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Her mom, Ila (Goldman) Friedman, was once a creator who based a Hungarian girls’s mag. Her father, Samuel, was once a cupboard maker and secretary-treasurer of his union.
After graduating a few of the first workforce of ladies admitted to the Bronx High School of Science, 3 blocks from her house, she turned into the primary in her circle of relatives to visit faculty, learning movie at New York University then in short attending City College and Hunter College. In 1986, she earned a grasp’s level in city research from Queens College of the City University of New York.
In 1949, she traveled to Budapest, the place she labored as a translator on the World Youth Festival; at school she joined the Labor Youth League, which were established through the Communist Party (despite the fact that she later stated she balked on the crimson flag-wavers’ vanity, dogmatism and denigration of ladies); and took classes in Marxism and Black historical past on the Jefferson School of Social Science, as soon as described in The Times as “the principal training center for Communists and Communist sympathizers in this city.”
She and her husband, Jack Goldman, had been energetic within the Urban League’s marketing campaign towards racial discrimination in housing. She additionally joined a bunch of white middle-class oldsters who supported faculty desegregation.
In 1966, Ms. Goldman and some other activist, Ellen Lurie, when compared the studying check ratings of each and every faculty within the town and publicized them as proof that Black scholars had been receiving an inferior schooling.
She and Evelina Antonetty arranged to reinforce South Bronx public faculties, growing a bilingual coaching initiative for adults thru United Bronx Parents and introducing a federally financed loose summer season foods program for youngsters in 1971; she helped draft rules when this system was once expanded nationally in 1979.
She and her husband divorced in 1974. In addition to her daughter, she is survived through her sons, Joseph and Robert Goldman; 5 grandsons, and two great-grandsons. Most of her family members who remained in Europe after her oldsters immigrated (her father from Slovakia and her mom from Hungary) had been killed within the Holocaust.
“I was really raised to believe that if more people had said something, then the Holocaust would not have happened,” Ms. Goldman’s daughter quoted her as announcing. “If there would have been a fight back, it would have been mitigated. I believe that ’til this day. You can do something. You can make a difference, you can make a change.”
