The nonprofit world lost one of its most effective and innovative leaders this month with the passing of Peter Goldberg, who died of a heart attack while vacationing with his wife in Maine.
The longtime chief executive of the Alliance for Children and Families and of Families International, the holding company created to oversee the alliance and its affiliated organizations, he was the perfect embodiment of the giving sector he served so ably during his distinguished career.
Peter was, fundamentally, a giver and a builder who saw nonprofit organizations as the ideal place to make a difference in the world. And what a difference he made.
He was unsparing in the personal time and attention he devoted to strengthening the nation’s nonprofit organizations, serving for many years as a member and later chair of the board of Independent Sector, the national alliance of charities and foundations, and as the convening chair of Leadership 18, a coalition of big nonprofit social-service providers.
He also spent eight years as chair of the steering committee of the Johns Hopkins Nonprofit Listening Post Project, where he and I worked closely on a project to help collect up-to-the-minute data to inform policy makers and nonprofit leaders about how charities were affected by major national developments, like the state of the economy, rising health-care costs, and new technological demands.
Peter was always accessible, always eager to help, and always full of sage advice.
But it was more than time and attention that Peter gave us and the nonprofits he cared so much about.
He also gave us ideas.
Peter was a font of ideas for how to improve nonprofit capacities and help the people they serve. He was also an effective transmission belt for the ideas of others, always willing to share what he learned and bring others into the conversation.
More than that, he had the skill and the perseverance to translate ideas into action and give us the structures that could sustain them over time.
This was already evident in the early stages of his career in philanthropy. As president of the Prudential Foundation and head of corporate social responsibility at Primerica, he was instrumental in helping to create one of the earliest, most ambitious, and successful grant-making collaboratives in our country, the 22-member consortium of foundations, corporations, and government agencies known as Living Cities, which has so far invested $600-million to build homes, stores, schools, and centers for child care, health care, and job-training in run-down urban neighborhoods across our country.
Named president of Family Service America in 1994, Peter set to work creating what has grown into a model of an entrepreneurial 21st-century nonprofit support organization.
Called Families International, this unusual organization is a holding company that oversees four other entities.
The group include two nonprofit umbrella associations with a combined membership of 500 organizations formed through an affiliation of three previous family-service and neighborhood-assistance associations; a highly successful for-profit subsidiary that taps the skills of those affiliated organizations to provide behavioral-health services to the employees of corporate clients; and a nonprofit subsidiary called Ways to Work that offers low-interest loans to help disadvantaged people get jobs and become self-sufficient.
But these were just the early chapters of Peter’s long career of innovative thinking and action to strengthen and improve the nation’s nonprofits.
Concerned about reports of declining attention to grass-roots organizing and advocacy on the part of nonprofit human-service organizations, he conceived an inventive project to help ensure that the authentic voices of the constituents served by his group’s members could be heard in communities across the country.
Recognizing the growing power of globalization, Peter reached out through the Johns Hopkins International Fellows in Philanthropy Program to build connections for his member organizations with counterparts abroad.
Aware of the enormous demographic shift caused by the growing share of older Americans, Peter again got ahead of the curve and launched the “New Age of Aging” project to acquaint human-service agencies with this challenge and prepare them to cope with it.
And just before his death, Peter launched the latest of his innovations, “Strategy Counts,” an effort to show that strategic thinking and social entrepreneurship are not limited to a small band of social enterprises but can operate successfully within the confines of mainline human-service organizations as well.
As this record of energetic innovation shows, it was his passion for nonprofits and their enormous potential that was perhaps Peter’s most important gift.
He was a stalwart advocate for nonprofits, and not simply as a set of organizations striving to survive in an uncertain world.
Peter had a visceral appreciation for the special role that nonprofit organizations perform as the institutional embodiments of the fundamental value of private initiative for the common good. And he challenged us all not to lose sight of the knowledge, visibility, ethical standards, good management, and supportive public policies needed to protect nonprofits and allow them to thrive.
Perhaps because of his willingness to give and to share, Peter had a rare knack for getting others to reciprocate. He was a master at chairing a meeting, capturing consensus out of the most heated discussion, and moving beyond argument to action.
He took people seriously and engaged them personally, traveling incessantly to remain in touch, even if it meant attending events in three cities in the course of a single day, and doing this multiple times most weeks.
Peter Goldberg was a remarkable leader and a remarkable human being who personified through his dedication, his passion, and his generosity, the values that underlie the philanthropic organizations he served so well. He will be sorely missed, but his example will continue to inspire us all.