Collection context
Summary
- Creator:
- Zeidenstein, George and Population Council
- Extent:
- 9.12 Cubic Feet
- Language:
- English .
Background
- Scope and Content:
The collection is comprised of George Zeidenstein's professional correspondence, spanning his seventeen years of service to the Population Council. Records include internal Population Council memoranda and reports, as well as travel notes and drafts of speeches for public appearances.
- Biographical / Historical:
George Zeidenstein, born July 29th 1929, started his undergraduate education at the University of Pittsburgh in 1947 and transferred to the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 1948. Zeidenstein later attended and graduated from Harvard Law School.
Zeidenstein began his professional career as a corporate and securities lawyer on Wall Street. However, after ten years he left Wall Street to work in support of voter registration drives for African-Americans in Mississippi and Arkansas in the 1960s. Emboldened by this experience, he then took on the directorship of the Peace Corps in Nepal, where he served from 1965 to 1968.
Continuing his work in international development issues, from 1971-1976, Zeidenstein served as the first Ford Foundation Representative in newly independent Bangladesh.
In 1976, John D. Rockefeller, 3rd the founder and first president of the Population Council, recruited Zeidenstein as the fifth president of the Council. Zeidenstein served as president of the Population Council for seventeen years. His presidency was quite innovative and transformative for the Council, particularly in the areas of diversity, equity and inclusion. Zeidenstein sought to internationalize the Council's board, staff, it's collaborative arrangements, and actively worked to expand its donor base. He added regional representatives to the Council's organizational chart and sought to decentralize decisionmaking by delegating authority to senior staff within the countries that the Council was active. Most importantly, Zeidenstein vastly expanded the status and role of women within the Council, and programatically established the role of women and girls and those communities and populations the Council served as a central theme of all Council activities. In 1993, Zeidenstein became a Distinguished Fellow at Harvard University's Center for Population and Development Studies.
For his work, Zeidenstein has been decorated by the governments of Senegal and Finland. Zeidenstein also served as a Board Member of the International Center for Research on Women.
In 2001 George Zeidenstein's memoirs, Lifelines, was published by Modern Memoirs Publishing of Amherst, MA. He passed away August 21, 2021 aged 92 in Goshen, Connecticut.
- Acquisition information:
- The George Zeidenstein papers were donated to the Rockefeller Archive Center by George Zeidenstein in 2010.
- Processing information:
Standard processing was conducted by Caty Gullickson in 2010-2011 to re-house, preserve and describe the collection. The collection guide was prepared in 2011 and entered into the RAC collection management system in 2012. George Zeidenstein's memoir Lifelines was used in the creation of the biographical sketch.
- Arrangement:
The collection is arranged as one series, and predominantly remains in its original chronological order, as maintained by George Zeidenstein.
- Rules or conventions:
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Access
- RESTRICTIONS:
-
Open for research. Brittle or damaged items are available at the discretion of RAC.
- TERMS OF ACCESS:
-
Rockefeller Archive Center has title, copyright and literary rights in the collection, in so far as it holds them. The Rockefeller Archive Center has authority to grant permission to cite and publish material from the collection.
- LOCATION OF THIS COLLECTION:
- CONTACT:
-