Kathy Goldman, who devoted her career as a civic leader to establishing food banks, pantries and free breakfast and lunch programs in public schools to sustain low-income New Yorkers, died March 5 in Brooklyn. He is 92.
The cause of death, at a hospital, was congestive heart failure, said his daughter, Julie Goldman.
Ms. is determined. Goldman to confront the collective apathy he felt contributed to the Holocaust. For five decades, she worked with numerous collaborators to lobby successfully for federal subsidies such as food stamps and nutritional assistance for women, children and infants; create partnerships between corporate providers of provisions and local communities; and expand the mandate of anti-hunger programs to include assistance with housing, health care, education and other needs.
In 1980, he founded the Community Food Resource Center, a food pantry, as a buffer against stricter eligibility requirements for welfare. Three years later, he helped organize what is now the Food Bank for New York City, which served many soup kitchens and food pantries around the city from the Hunts Point market in the Bronx. He was the center’s executive director until his retirement in 2003.
In 1984 he started the Community Kitchen of West Harlem, an innovative program that not only offered food, but also helped the hungry with other needs, including housing and health care. After the renovation in the dining area, “when a 10-year-old boy exclaimed, ‘It’s just like McDonald’s!’ ‘Goldman considered this the greatest compliment of all time to come from a child,’” writes Lana Dee Povitz in “Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice” (2019).
In the early 1990s, he encouraged the city to open school cafeterias in Chinatown and Harlem at night to serve dinners to adults.
“He was the single most important voice fighting hunger in New York for 50 years and the first to focus on food in schools, resulting in literally thousands of kids actually eating food instead of throwing it away, Fran Barrett, Gov. Kathy Hochul, interagency coordinator for nonprofit organizations, said via email.
In creating federal school breakfast and summer meal programs in New York, Ms. Goldman “hire people with expertise and get out of their way,” said Ms. Barrett, who became one of her collaborators (along with Liz Krueger, who would become a state senator, and Mary McCormick of New York Community Trust).
In 2002, Ms. Goldman carried the Olympic torch for a quarter mile in New York and in 2012 was honored by President Barack Obama at the White House as a “champion of change” for helping to reduce hunger in America.
After he retired from the food center, he and Agnes Molnar founded it Community Food Advocates in 2009 to lobby for universal school lunch and other government strategies to meet the nutritional needs of Americans.
As Ms. often said. Goldman: “Tomorrow morning, if the testament is there, we won’t have any hunger. There is no shortage of food.”
In 2022, he moved to a retirement community in Sleepy Hollow, NY
Catherine Vera Friedman (she later changed her name to Kathryn, after the actress Kathryn Grayson) was born on January 15, 1932, in the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His mother, Ila (Goldman) Friedman, was a writer who founded a Hungarian women’s magazine. His father, Samuel, was a cabinet maker and secretary-treasurer of his union.
After graduating in the first group of girls admitted to the Bronx High School of Science, three blocks from her home, she became the first in her family to go to college, studying film at New York University and briefly at City College and Hunter College. In 1986, he earned a master’s degree in urban studies from Queens College of the City University of New York.
In 1949, he traveled to Budapest, where he worked as a translator at the World Youth Festival; in college he joined the Labor Youth League, founded by the Communist Party (though he later said he rejected the self-importance, dogmatism and slander of the red flag-wavers on women); and took courses in Marxism and Black history at the Jefferson School of Social Science, once described in The Times as “the main training center for Communists and Communist sympathizers in this city.”
She and her husband, Jack Goldman, were active in the Urban League’s campaign against racial discrimination in housing. He also joined a group of white middle-class parents who supported school desegregation.
In 1966, Ms. compared Goldman and another activist, Ellen Lurie, took the reading test scores of every school in the city and presented them as evidence that Black students were receiving an inferior education.
He and Evelina Antonetti organized to improve public schools in the South Bronx, developing a bilingual adult training initiative through United Bronx Parents and introducing a federally funded free summer meal program for children in 1971; he helped draft regulations when the program was expanded nationwide in 1979.
She and her husband divorced in 1974. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by her sons, Joseph and Robert Goldman; five grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. Most of his relatives who remained in Europe after his parents immigrated (his father from Slovakia and his mother from Hungary) were killed in the Holocaust.
“I was really raised to believe that if more people had said something, then the Holocaust would not have happened,” Ms.’s daughter said. Goldman quoted him as saying. “If there was a fight, it was reduced. I believe that until now. You can do something. You can make a difference, you can make a difference.”
