Marilyn Gelber reflects on achievements of Brooklyn Community Foundation
The biggest accomplishment of the Brooklyn Community Foundation, established three-and-a-half years ago as the successor to the Independence Community Foundation, is the fact that “the foundation belongs to Brooklyn, rather than a private foundation, a wealthy individual or a corporation. Creating this foundation for Brooklyn is accomplishment number one.”
So says Marilyn Gelber, the founder and president of the Brooklyn Community Foundation, After 15 years in philanthropy and 28 years before that in the public sector, Ms. Gelber is leaving her post at the end of June, although she is unsure about what will happen “in the third act of my life.”
Brooklyn, for all intents and purposes, is a city, she says, and “most cities of this size have their own foundation. Brooklyn has more poor people than Detroit, and more wealthy people than Greenwich, Connecticut. It is getting wealthier, getting younger, but at the same time a huge amount of poverty exists here. We want to create vehicles together so Brooklyn is not `a tale of two cities.’”