Former Cleveland Foundation CEO Steven Minter Dies At 80

Former Cleveland Foundation CEO Steven A. Minter died Thursday night at the age of 80.

Minter ran the foundation from 1984 until 2003. According to current CEO Ronn Richard, Minter brought a billion dollars of funding to the foundation during his tenure.

“He really was a giant in the field,” said Richard in a 2014 ideastream documentary.

“I’m incredibly sad,” said Leslie Dunford, current Vice President for Administration and Strategic Projects at the Cleveland Foundation. “He has been a mentor and a friend for 30 years. He has left an amazing impact on my life. When I heard of his passing last night it was like losing a family member, it truly was.

“Steve was the kind of leader who made everyone in the room feel special,” Dunford said. “No one was beneath him. He took the time to be kind to you and to say hello and to welcome you to whatever position you were.”

Dunford says she’ll remember attending group events with Minter and watching the reaction of others.

“CEOs from community foundations or other large foundations, private foundations would flock to him, because they wanted to hear what he was doing, what we were doing, what he had to say,” Dunford said. “He had that type of personality and he shied away from the spotlight.”

In the 1980s, Minter and the Cleveland Foundation helped create the first market-rate rental apartments in the Hough neighborhood. He also directed the foundation’s grants toward AIDS awareness in the 1980s, a decade when the disease was still largely ignored, especially in the Midwest.

“He began to position the foundation in a way that it was less a responsive funder and more of a leader,” former Cleveland Foundation Executive Vice President Robert Eckardt told Crain’s Cleveland Business in 2010. “It became a foundation that took on initiatives rather than just responding to (requests) that came in.”

Minter’s time at the helm also included the founding of Cuyahoga Arts and Culture and the rehabbing of theatres in downtown Cleveland’s Playhouse Square. Ideastream receives support from CAC.

After leaving the Cleveland Foundation in 2003, Minter took up an executive-in-residence position at Cleveland State University’s Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs, where he stayed involved in community work.

“If you look at Cleveland and you look at where we’ve got significant issues,” Minter said in a 2013 presentation to foundation staff, “is that there are fewer and fewer people in this community who feel that they are going to be able to get out of the trench where they are.”

Minter’s career in social work and philanthropy in the Cleveland area goes back to 1960 when he began working as a caseworker at the Cuyahoga County Welfare Department, now the Department of Human Services. He stayed at the county through the 60s, moving up to department director in 1969.

He then worked as Commissioner of Public Welfare in Massachusetts from 1970 to 1975 before joining President Jimmy Carter’s brand new Education Department as an undersecretary.

Minter was born in Akron on October 23, 1938. He attended Baldwin Wallace College in Berea as an undergraduate and received his master’s in education from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

“There are people you meet in your lifetime who you immediately know were put on this earth to be a powerful, life-changing force for good – Steve Minter was one of those people,” said Richard in a written statement Friday. “His first purpose was to serve the citizens of Cleveland, and the hundreds of people he mentored, many of whom dedicated their lives to public service because of the path he forged for all of us. He was an inspired teacher, and most important, an incredible friend to whom we are deeply saddened to say goodbye.”