Kathy Goldman, who dedicated 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 was 92 years old.
Her daughter, Julie Goldman, said the cause of death, at a hospital, was congestive heart failure.
Ms. Goldman was determined to confront the collective indifference she felt had contributed to the Holocaust. Over five decades she worked with many partners to successfully lobby for federal subsidies such as food stamps and nutritional assistance for women, children and infants. build partnerships between corporate supply providers and local communities; and expand the mandate of anti-hunger programs to include assistance with housing, health care, education and other needs.
In 1980, she founded the Community Food Resource Center, a food pantry, as a buffer against stricter welfare eligibility requirements. Three years later he helped organize what is now the Food Bank for the City of New York, which served many soup kitchens and food pantries throughout the city from Hunts Point Market in the Bronx. She was the center’s executive director until her retirement in 2003.
In 1984 he started the Community Kitchen of West Harlem, an innovative program that not only provided food, but also helped the hungry with other needs, including housing and health care. After renovating the dining room, “when a 10-year-old boy exclaimed, ‘It’s just like McDonald’s!’ Goldman “considered it the greatest compliment ever to come from a child,” wrote Lana Dee Povitz in Stirrings: How Activist New Yorkers Ignited a Movement for Food Justice (2019).
In the early 1990s, he convinced the city to open school cafeterias in Chinatown and Harlem in the evenings to serve dinners to older adults.
“She was the most important voice fighting hunger in New York for 50 years and the first to focus on school food, which resulted in literally thousands of children eating the food as opposed to throwing it away,” Fran Barrett , governor. Kathy Hochul, its interagency coordinator for nonprofits, said via email.
In establishing federal school breakfast and summer meal programs in New York, Ms. Goldman “she hired people who had expertise and went out of their way,” said Ms. Barrett, who was one of her partners (along with Liz Krueger, who would become a senator, and Mary McCormick of the New York Community Trust).
In 2002, Ms. Goldman was invited to carry the Olympic torch for a quarter mile in New York City 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 retiring from the food center, she and Agnes Molnar founded Community Food Advocates in 2009 to lobby for universal school lunch and other government strategies to meet the nutritional needs of Americans.
As Mrs. Goldman often said: “Tomorrow morning, if the will were there, we would have no hunger. There is no shortage of food.”
In 2022, he moved to a retirement community in Sleepy Hollow, NY
Kathryn Vera Friedman (later changed her name to Kathryn, after actress Kathryn Grayson) was born on January 15, 1932 in the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Her mother, Ila (Goldman) Friedman, was a writer who founded a Hungarian women’s magazine. Her father, Samuel, was a cabinetmaker and secretary-treasurer of his union.
After graduating from the first group of girls accepted to the Bronx High School of Science, three blocks from her home, she became the first in her family to attend college, studying film at New York University and then briefly attending 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, she traveled to Budapest, where she worked as a translator at the World Youth Festival. in college he joined the Youth Labor League, which had been founded by the Communist Party (though he later said he rejected the self-importance, dogmatism, and devaluation of women of the red flag wavers). and took classes in Marxism and Black history at the Jefferson School of the Social Sciences, once described in the Times as “the principal center for the education of 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 desegregation of schools.
In 1966, Ms. Goldman and another activist, Ellen Lurie, compared the reading test scores of every school in the city and publicized them as evidence that black students were receiving an inferior education.
She and Evelina Antonetty organized to improve the South Bronx public schools, developing a bilingual training initiative for adults through United Bronx Parents and introducing a federal free summer meals program for children in 1971. She helped write regulations when the program expanded to national level 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 her relatives who remained in Europe after her parents emigrated (her father from Slovakia and her mother from Hungary) were killed in the Holocaust.
“I was really brought up to believe that if more people had said something, then the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened,” said Mrs. Goldman’s daughter. “If there was opposition, it would have been moderated. I believe that until today. You can DO SOMETHING. You can make a difference, you can make a change.”
