Kathy Goldman, who worked as a civic leader to establish food banks, pantries and free breakfast and lunch programs in public schools to sustain low-income people, died March 5 in Brooklyn New Yorker life. She is 92 years old.
Her daughter, Julie Goldman, said the cause of her death at the hospital was congestive heart failure.
To combat malnutrition, Ms. Goldman was determined to confront the collective apathy she believed was one of the causes of the Holocaust. For more than fifty years, she has worked with many collaborators to successfully lobby for federal subsidies such as food stamps and nutritional assistance for women, children, and infants; to build partnerships between local communities and food providers; to expand anti-hunger programs The scope of the mission includes meeting housing, health care, education and other needs.
In 1980, she founded the Community Food Resource Center, a nonprofit food advocacy organization, as a buffer against more stringent welfare eligibility requirements.Three years later, she helped organize what is now New York City Food Bank, which serves dozens of soup kitchens and food pantries across the city from Hunts Point Market in the Bronx. She served as the center’s executive director until her retirement in 2003.
In 1984, she launched the West Harlem Community Kitchen, an innovative program that not only provided food but also helped the hungry with other needs, including housing and health care. After the dining area makeover, “when a 10-year-old boy exclaimed, ‘This is just like McDonald’s!'” Goldman “thought it was the greatest compliment ever from a child,” Lana Dee Povitz, in Stirring Up: How New York Activists Ignited the Food Justice Movement (2019).
In the early 1990s, Ms. Goldman persuaded city governments to open school cafeterias in Chinatown and Harlem to serve evening meals to senior citizens.
“She has been New York’s most important voice in the fight against hunger for 50 years and a The first one to look at school food, which actually resulted in thousands of kids actually eating that food instead of throwing it away.”
Ms. Barrett was one of her collaborators (along with Liz Krueger, who would become a state senator, Mary McCormick New York City Fund).
In 2002, Ms. Goldman was invited to carry the Olympic torch a quarter mile in New York, and in 2012, she was named a “Champion of Change” by President Barack Obama at the White House for helping to reduce hunger in the United States.
After retiring from food centers, she and Agnes Molnar founded community food advocate In 2009, lobbied for universal school lunches and other government strategies to meet the nutritional needs of Americans.
As Ms. Goldman often said: “Tomorrow morning, if we had the will, we would not be hungry. There would be no shortage of food.”
In 2022, she moved to Sleepy Hollow, a retirement community in New York
Catherine Vera Friedman (later renamed Catherine, after actress Katharine Grayson) was born in the Bronx on January 15, 1932, 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 cabinet maker and secretary-treasurer of the union.
She was one of the first girls to be admitted to the Bronx High School of Science (three blocks from her home), and after graduation she became the first in her family to go to college, studying film at New York University and then briefly attending City College and Hunter College. In 1986, she received a master’s degree in urban studies from Queens College, City University of New York.
In 1949, Ms. Goldman traveled to Budapest to work as an interpreter at the World Youth Day; in college, she joined the Communist Youth League of Labor (although she later said she was dissatisfied with the Red Flag Wavers’ self-righteousness, dogmatism, and denigration of women) felt hesitant); and took courses in Marxism and black history at the Jefferson School of Social Sciences, once described by The Times as “the city’s major training center for Communists and Communist sympathizers.”
She and her husband, Jack Goldman, were active in the Urban League’s campaign against racial discrimination in housing. She also joined a group of white, middle-class parents who supported school desegregation.
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 received inferior educations.
she and Evelina Antoni Organized to improve South Bronx public schools, developed a bilingual training program for adults through United Bronx Parents, and launched the federally funded free summer meals program for children in 1971; when the program expanded nationally in 1979, she Helped draft regulations.
Ms. Goldman and her husband divorced in 1974. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by sons Joseph and Robert Goldman; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Most of her relatives who remained in Europe after her parents immigrated—her father was from Slovakia, her mother from Hungary—were killed in the Holocaust.
“I grew up believing that if more people had said something, the Holocaust would not have happened,” Ms. Goldman was quoted as saying by her daughter. “If there had been a fight back, the situation would have eased. I believe that to this day. You can do something. You can make a difference, you can make a change.”
