Often, when wealthy individuals pass away, they leave quite a bit of their estate to loved ones. When prominent Baltimore real estate mogul Morris Goldseker passed away in 1973, he did things a little differently.

He used it to start a nonprofit, said Goldseker Foundation President and CEO Matthew Gallagher.

“He was the founder of the foundation and left his estate for its creation. He had no heirs. He never married, didn’t have any children, and he left the entirety of his estate to create the foundation. And he directed his two nephews, Sheldon and Simon Goldseker, to oversee the creation of the foundation,” Gallagher said.

Since then, the foundation has turned the $11 million it started with into over $140 million in donations to the Baltimore community. And this year, the Goldseker Foundation is celebrating its 50th year in operation.

Shelley Goldseker is a family member, as Morris Goldseker was her husband’s uncle. Today, she serves on the board of directors, as do a number of other folks with the family’s last name. She said that Jewish values have guided the foundation since the beginning.

“The Associated is one of the selectors, advisors, and has been since the foundation was created,” she said. “Our Jewish roots have a strong bearing. Morris came [to the United States] … and he worked his way up. He worked a variety of jobs and was definitely influenced by what he went through in life and the opportunity that America afforded immigrants at the time.”

While Goldseker was a Jew and the foundation is strongly rooted in Jewish values, its donations and community work are spread across various causes in Baltimore. The Goldseker Foundation is Jewish in its spirit, but it cannot be summed up as a Jewish communal organization. Shelley Goldseker said that for her family, helping the whole city is important.

“I’ve lived in Baltimore my whole life. I would spend a lot of time downtown as a child, and have a real affinity for the pride that people had then and still have in the city, so to help it stay as vital and as meaningful and as safe a city as it can be is not only our mandate but our dream,” she said. “For all of us, we’re very interested in helping in any way we can to revitalize the city and keep the institution strong and healthy and meaningful and responsive to the people of Baltimore.”

Gallagher has been a part of the team for 13 of the 50 years that it has existed, and he said that the responsibility of those involved today is to make sure that the foundation lasts well into the future. How it has done that thus far and how it continues to do so is rooted in the idea of responding to what the community needs at a given time.

“Morris Goldseker really wanted to create an institution that was going to benefit Baltimore’s people and institutions forever, and he wanted the people who were responsible for kind of stewarding these assets to make decisions that were important and responsive to the needs of the time. So over the course of the history of the foundation, we have really tried very hard to keep our ear to the ground, to work closely with members of the community to determine what they need and be supportive of that,” he said.

In 2020, the Goldseker Foundation pivoted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, directing much of its work towards direct services while accelerating its grant process to provide an immediate crutch when the community needed urgent help.

Right now, they are particularly focused on urban revitalization and the vacancy issues in Baltimore City. That’s apt considering that Morris Goldseker largely made his wealth purchasing homes in foreclosure and then renting them to communities who were historically discriminated against. As the organization celebrates five decades in existence, it is doing so in a way that would probably make its founder very proud.

“There is really great pride in the efforts of all the organizations in Baltimore, all the nonprofits, and the people that work so hard in making them as responsible to the people of Baltimore and the needs of the community as they do,” Shelley Goldseker said.

“Baltimore is just an amazing place to live, and [I’m] very proud of what role the foundation has been able to have in helping it in that way.”

aguckes@midatlanticmedia.com