1997 Distinguished Leadership Award

AIDS Action Committee

Robert A. Glassman, cofounder and chairman of Wainwright Bank, has provided a model of corporate leadership in response to the AIDS epidemic. His belief in business as a catalyst for social change celebrates diversity and supports community development, with a focus on AIDS as the defining social issue of our times.

Under Bob's guidance, Wainwright has become a leader in financing and funding AIDS housing and service programs including Victory Programs, 270 Huntington Avenue, the Sheila Daniels House, RUAH, Rosie's Place, the Pine Street Inn, the Cambridge YMCA, the Boston Living Center, and AIDS Housing Corporation, among others. While representing less than one percent of the banking assets in the area, Wainwright has participated in over 50% of the local development of housing for people living with AIDS. The Wainwright Bank Community Card® MasterCard not only generates funding for local AIDS organizations, but has helped direct the attention of consumers and, surprisingly, the banking industry to this issue. Over 40% of the Bank's 1996 charitable donations were to AIDS related organizations.

As an entrepreneur in both the business and nonprofit worlds, Bob has devoted time, money and energy to creating several organizations and activities designed to better the lives of those in need. One institution is the William Joiner Foundation, a national organization based in Boston that he founded in the 1980s which not only serves as an advocate for American Vietnam veterans, but promotes scholarship and teaching on war and its social consequences, provides support to Vietnamese citizens on health-related issues, and sponsors cultural exchanges for artists and writers from both countries.

He set up the Robert A. Glassman Fellowship Fund at the Harvard Business School, a scholarship to assist MBA students in financial need, partly in response to his own inner-city public school background. In 1996, as a director of the Boston foundation, his leadership was instrumental in the development of the first Gay & Lesbian Fund at a major community foundation.

Whether as an entrepreneur, director, alumnus or philanthropist, Bob has consistently made AIDS a priority issue. "I believe it's important to use the platform the Bank affords me to inform, educate, and introduce different constituencies to issues of social justice. This work, alongside the culture of diversity we've developed at the Bank, is the most important legacy I contemplate I will leave my children."

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