George Esser

George Hyndman Esser, Jr. (born c. 1921 in Norton, Virginia - died November 5, 2006 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina) was a civil rights advocate and a crusader against poverty who led the North Carolina Fund at the request of then-governor Terry Sanford in the 1960s.

Education

Esser graduated from the Virginia Military Institute and served in the United States Army's 89th Chemical Mortar Battalion during World War II. In 1948, he graduated from Harvard 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 in Washington, D.C..

He received the North Carolina Philanthropy Award in 1995.