By 1972, the U.S. PIRG had recruited 350,000 students on 50 campuses in 13 states to participate in civic advocacy, mostly funded by student activities.
Lee Wasserman, who succeeded Mr. Ross as director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, which Mr. Ross ran from 1985 to 1999, said Mr Ross’s “lavish insight and creative solutions” helped “a generation of public interest advocates to educate”.
As what the fund called the “first public interest advocate hired to run a national foundation,” Mr Ross directed grants to encourage civic participation, government accountability and economic justice for women.
He seeded so many sustainable organizations, said Mark Green, another Nader’s Raider original and New York City’s first elected public advocate, that he became “a Johnny Appleseed of public interest.”
Donald Kemp Ross was born on June 29, 1943 in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx. His father, Hugh Ross, was a Conservation Foundation trustee; his mother, Helen (Kemp) Ross, was a homemaker.
After graduating from Fordham Preparatory School, he attended Fordham University in the Bronx, where, as student body president, he played a key role in reviving club football after a 10-year hiatus from the sport’s rich history. there. (That experience “taught me how to organize,” Mr Ross told The Fordham News in 2015.)
After hitchhiking to California in 1964 and sleeping on the press room floor at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, where Barry Goldwater was nominated for President Ross once remembered), he earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1965.
