Environmental Philanthropist Rhoda Goldman Dies at 71

Rhoda Haas Goldman, a prominent philanthropist who co-founded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize to encourage grass-roots activism, has died. She was 71.

A great-grandniece of entrepreneur Levi Strauss, Goldman was a board member of Levi Strauss & Co. She died Feb. 17 of a heart attack in Honolulu where she was vacationing. Her home was in her native San Francisco.

In 1990, she and her husband, Richard, founded the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, which has awarded more than $25 million in grants to organizations working to help the environment, youths and the elderly.

The couple also set up the Goldman Environmental Prize, which annually awards $75,000 each to six individuals around the world for their fights to protect rivers and rain forests, restore watersheds, curb toxic waste dumping and protect endangered species, among other efforts. The prize, the largest in its field, has come to be known as “the Nobel Prize for the environment.”

“I was weaned on social responsibility,” Goldman told The Times in 1985.

She and her two brothers, Peter and the late Walter Haas Jr., in 1989 contributed $15 million to UC Berkeley, the largest single personal donation to that campus, for the School of Business Administration named for their father, Walter A. Haas. All four were UC Berkeley graduates.

“Our family has always been devoted to Berkeley,” she said at the time.

Goldman was president of San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El from 1991 to 1993 and vice president of the San Francisco Symphony from 1991 until her death. She also chaired Mayor Dianne Feinstein’s Committee for a Memorial to the Six Million Victims of the Holocaust.

Always working to assist women who have breast cancer, Goldman co-founded the San Francisco chapter of the Reach to Recovery Program. She also was a director of Mount Zion Health Systems, a president of the Mount Zion Hospital and Medical Center, and chairwoman of the San Francisco Foundation Distribution Committee.

In addition to her husband and her brother, Goldman is survived by three children, John and Douglas Goldman and Susan Gelman, and 11 grandchildren.