NEWSLETTER
|
In Memoriam, Winter 2020
Margaret Lowe, Director of Human Resources at the Foundation from 1981 through 1993, died January 30 at her home in Greenwich, Conn. She was 92.
After earning a master’s degree from Teachers College of Columbia University, she worked in personnel management for several companies in New York City, including New York Life, Warner Lambert and West Virginia Pulp and Paper. She then was personnel director at Barnard College and the Institute of International Education before joining Ford.
Her extensive public service included work with the League of Women Voters and Legal Aid. She was on the Board of Directors of the YWCA of the City of New York, serving as its chair from 1986 to 1990, and a member of the board of Greenwich House, from 1994 to 2008.
Her husband, E. Nobles Lowe, died in 2015. She is survived by a son, Jim.
Jose Zalaquett, a human rights activist who, as a consultant, helped the Ford Foundation establish an initiative to combat rights abuses in Colombia, died February 15 at his home in Santiago, Chile.
Mr. Zalaquett, a lawyer, had been a member of the Socialist government of Salvador Allende in his native country and a university professor when he was jailed and later expelled for his activities under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, who led Chile after a military coup in 1973.
He joined other lawyers and activists in providing legal and moral support to dissidents and became chief counsel of the Committee of Cooperation for Peace, an interfaith group founded to aid political prisoners and their families.
He said in an interview with ABC News years later that his work during the Pinochet era convinced him that “inside every one of us there is the potential for the beast” but that there also is “potential for the most noble acts”.
After he was exiled in 1976, he became chair of the international executive committee of Amnesty International and then its deputy secretary general. He returned to Chile in 1986 and served on a national truth and reconciliation commission.
In 1988, he was asked by the Ford Foundation to help it develop a branch in Colombia of the Andean Commission of Jurists.
Felice Levin, a writer and program evaluator at the Foundation from 1968 to 1985, died December 8.
|