Good evening, everyone:

Joel Fleishman was one of the most extraordinary people to have graced philanthropy over the last fifty years. He passed last week at the age of 90.

Joel – Professor Fleishman to be exact – was invited in 1971 by former North Carolina governor Terry Sanford to create a public policy program at Duke. Joel began modestly – by his standards, if not by others’ – by creating the Institute of Policy Sciences and Public Affairs; the Institute became the Sanford School of Public Policy in 2009.  Because he was also a superbly successful fundraiser, he was made vice president of the university in 1985, senior vice president in 1988, and first senior vice president in 1993. All the while teaching classes on philanthropy, building the public policy program, researching, and writing.

In his seminal work The Foundation: A Great American Secret—How Private Wealth Is Changing the World, (published in 2007 and released in an expanded paperback edition in 2009), Joel traced the evolution of American philanthropy, supplemented with fifty exhaustive case studies of exemplary work. In the nearly 500 pages of the tome, Kresge had received a single sentence. Joel had subsequently taken notice, however, of the work Kresge was doing about that time – in Detroit and elsewhere – and was determined to learn more. He invited me to address his philanthropy class and to spend two hours with his philanthropy seminar – called the Foundation Impact Research Group (FIRG) seminar – that brought together national philanthropy leaders with faculty from across Duke’s different schools – law, business, planning, public policy – practicing philanthropists, nonprofit leaders, legislators, students, and others. To say it was an intimidating invitation would be an understatement – the attendees read like a who’s who of the nonprofit sector of the Southeastern seaboard.

That first talk focused on the changes Kresge was ushering in the 2009-’10 era, complete with a set of concept drawings. Joel was so taken with the story of Kresge’s transformation and its role in helping stabilize Detroit that he asked me to come back the next year, and the next, and the next – all the way through 2023. He was particularly enamored of the drawings, each year explaining to the FIRG audience that I would present an entirely new set of them to update the progress that Detroit had made, and how philanthropy’s role was changing. He noted to me over my first dinner with him that because he had never seen anyone come at philanthropic practice through the use of those kind of visuals, he wanted to encourage me to keep tracking the Kresge and Detroit stories through them. He said he would keep inviting me back as long as I kept drawing – and, presumably, as long as the Detroit story continued to evolve.

Well, that story did continue to evolve, of course: the pre-bankruptcy build-out captured in the nine modules of the Reimagining Detroit 2020 drawing . . . the bankruptcy . . .  the immediate post-bankruptcy re-set in both Mayor’s Duggan’s administration and Kresge’s fuller pivot to the neighborhoods . . . the emergence of the American Cities practice . . . the stabilization and reimagination of Marygrove . . . the COVID years . . . and on and on. With each turn of the wheel, a refined narrative about the city’s trajectory . . . a sharper sense of philanthropic role . . . a new suite of drawings.

I both dreaded and reveled in my pilgrimages – dreaded because I knew that I would have to produce that new drawing set every year, but reveled because it was the essence of provocative, challenging intellectual engagement with seminar participants who were curious and insightful, provocative and creative.

Joel was perhaps the most engaged participant, commenting, suggesting, questioning.  Indeed, when he published a second major treatise in 2017, Putting Wealth to Work: Philanthropy for Today or Investing for Tomorrow?, he dedicated an entire chapter to Kresge’s evolution.

Joel was perhaps Duke’s (if not North Carolina’s) foremost wine connoisseur. (Indeed, Tina Brown – after having one of those incomparable Fleishman dinners – had invited him to write a monthly wine column for Vanity Fair, which ran for eight years.) That becomes important for two reasons. First, the night before the seminar, he would take me to dinner, ordering the very best vintage from his private cellar at the Washington Inn – even for someone like me with a palette of limited sophistication, it was clear I was ingesting something quite out of the ordinary Second, because following the next day’s seminar, Joel would host a dinner reception for the FIRG speaker at his home, where not one, but four or five of those exceptional bottles of wine made the rounds among 75 people from all walks of life. The effect was all the more remarkable because Joel’s home looked like it could double as a used bookstore – a very sophisticated and expansive used bookstore – with texts piled eight feet high in every nook and cranny.

What all of this doesn’t begin to capture is not only just how intellectually rigorous Joel was, but also how generous, spirited, passionate, and humble. He had run Atlantic Philanthropies (taking a leave from Duke from 1993-2003), so he knew enough about the mechanics of philanthropy to see through nonsense. He was a man a profound religious faith (he served as the cantor in Fayetteville’s Beth Israel Synagogue for fifty years), so he appreciated how profoundly the heart has to inform the privilege of giving and service. He was a scholar with three advanced degrees, so he insisted on contextualizing, analyzing, deconstructing. He was a man of the renaissance, able and eager to have conversations about religion, politics, ethics, art, travel, history, or anything else his dinner partner might offer up. And he was, above all, a mensch, who loved people and who took enormous joy in having fun, injecting irony, not taking himself too seriously.

Every holiday season, I counted myself lucky to receive, along with 2,623 of Joel’s other closest friends and colleagues, his miraculous long-form poem reflecting on the past year. If, heaven forbid, I ever get too full of myself about my nightly notes, I look at one of Joel’s holiday cards. A full and effective corrective.

The world has lost a transcendent talent, an incomparably warm and generous soul, and a dear friend to too many to count.  His spirit will live on, imprinted indelibly in our hearts and our memories. I will miss him greatly.

Rip

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