- George Esser
George Hyndman Esser, Jr. (born c. 1921 in
Norton, Virginia - diedNovember 5 ,2006 inChapel Hill, North Carolina ) was acivil rights advocate and a crusader againstpoverty who led theNorth Carolina Fund at the request of then-governor Terry Sanford in the 1960s.Education
Esser graduated from the
Virginia Military Institute and served in theUnited States Army 's 89th Chemical Mortar Battalion duringWorld War II . In 1948, he graduated fromHarvard Law School .Career
After law school, he joined the Institute of Government at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill .Sanford asked Esser in 1963 to run the experimental
North Carolina Fund , which in its five years established community action agencies across the state. When he died, he was a board member of MDC Inc., a job training program established by the fund in 1967.Esser later was a program adviser for the
Ford Foundation , executive director of the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta and executive director of the National Academy of Public Administration inWashington, D.C. .He received the North Carolina Philanthropy Award in 1995.
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