Pablo Eisenberg, a social justice advocate who decried U.S. philanthropy as a cozy club of privilege and tirelessly pushed major donors to address inequities and an economic system that can leave many behind, died Oct. 18 at a nursing facility in Rockville, Maryland. He was 90.
His death was confirmed by Deepak Bhargava, a former president of Community Change, a civil and economics rights group where Eisenberg served as executive director for more than two decades before becoming a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute. No cause of death was given.
Eisenberg’s long career was spent working to shift priorities among private foundations, corporate charities and grant-giving organizations – calling for a greater voice by lower-income people, minorities and other vulnerable groups in how the money is spent.
“I believe in empowerment, as I think almost everyone does,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1986. “The purpose of empowerment and self-help is not to guarantee that everyone will succeed but to provide equal opportunities for everyone.”
His path to activism and academia, however, also came with a backstory on the tennis courts. Eisenberg was a rising tennis star in his youth, reaching a No. 9 ranking in doubles in the United States in 1954 and making it to the Wimbledon men’s doubles quarterfinals the next year with partner John Ager.
Eisenberg is named after his godfather, the renowned cellist Pablo Casals. A Walter Mitty-style fantasy, Eisenberg once said, was to own a Stradivarius cello and learn to play it well.
A defining moment for Eisenberg came in 1973 after nearly 20 years in nonprofit and government roles, including three years in Africa with the U.S. Information Agency. In an article for a relatively obscure journal, the Grantsmanship Center News, Eisenberg posed a question: Is it the needy, or really the well-off, who benefit most from philanthropy?
At the time, a private panel with influential political ties, known as the Filer Commission, was studying the fallout of tax-code changes and other rules that could impact philanthropy. Eisenberg argued that the commission was ignoring the people who most needed the help and left no room for public accountability.
The article gained national attention and prompted some favorable editorials in newspapers including the Baltimore Sun. The commission became “disturbed by the brouhaha,” Eisenberg said in a 2016 oral history. That led to a meeting with the commission’s executive director, tax lawyer Leonard Silverstein, whom Eisenberg described as condescending.
“For example, he could not understand why I, a ‘gentleman’ who had attended the ‘right’ schools, still associated with the ‘great unwashed,’ ” Eisenberg recounted.
Later, however, Eisenberg managed to bring representatives of major nonprofit groups and charities into talks with commission members, including its namesake John Filer, chief executive of insurance giant Aetna. It changed the direction of the commission’s work.
Eisenberg also used the meetings to help create the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a national watchdog and fundraising group representing nonprofits and others.
While traveling, Eisenberg was a definition of frugality – always combing for rock-bottom airfares and staying in budget hotels. At Community Change (then known as the Center for Community Change), he refused a company car. “If I get one, then everyone on the staff should,” he said.
But he wasn’t reticent when it came to pressing mainstream foundations to send more money directly to grass-roots groups or other projects he favored. It was a message he gave to his allies, too. Make your case, loudly and relentlessly, he urged.
Nonprofits must stop being “gutless wonders,” he said at a 1997 conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and work more as advocates for people without power. Other times, he took swipes at journalists for being “cheerleaders” while covering big-money donors and lambasted universities for a “higher-education caste system” that pays “bare-bones” wages to maintenance workers and other support staff.
“There are almost no grants given to look at the free-enterprise system, its excesses, its corruption, in some cases,” Eisenberg told NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” in 2006. “There’s very little money that goes into watchdog groups that are meant to hold government and other institutions accountable, so that’s not by accident.”
Eisenberg’s former colleague Barghava recalled waiting for his job interview in 1994 and hearing Eisenberg “scream and curse at the top of his lungs on the phone at someone.” It was Community Change’s largest funder.
“He showed his respect for you by letting you have it,” Barghava said.
Pablo Samuel Eisenberg was born in Paris on July 1, 1932, and immigrated with his family to New Jersey when he was 7 in 1939 as World War II begin to grip Europe.
He graduated from Princeton in 1954 and Merton College at the University of Oxford in 1957, becoming captain of the tennis team at both schools. He played at Wimbledon five times and, in 1953, won a gold medal in tennis doubles at the Maccabiah Games in Israel with partner Grant Golden.
Eisenberg served in the U.S. Army in the late 1950s and was with the U.S. Information Agency from 1960 to 1963 in Senegal and elsewhere in Africa, then spent an additional two years as program director of Operation Crossroads, which helped provide a model for the new Peace Corps.
He returned to the United States and worked in various roles at the Office of Economic Opportunity before becoming deputy director for field operations at the National Urban Coalition.
He was executive director at what is now Community Change from 1975 to 1988. He received a German Marshall Fund fellowship in 1989 to study nonprofits in Britain, France and the Netherlands. After joining Georgetown’s Public Policy Institute in 1999, Eisenberg published many articles and a 2004 book “Challenges for Nonprofits and Philanthropy: The Courage to Change.”
He is survived by a daughter, Marina. His wife of 62 years, Helen Cierniak, died earlier this year.
Eisenberg described his personal motto as: The world is run by those who show up.
In 2012, even the pandas at the National Zoo were not spared Mr. Eisenburg’s critical eye.
In a piece for the Chronicle of Philanthropy, he took aim at The Washington Post for giving more than passing coverage of private-equity billionaire David Rubenstein and his $4.5 million gift in 2011 to help the zoo care for its pandas.
“Nobody ever asks,” Eisenberg wrote, “whether his money should go to worthier causes.”
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