The former executive director of the Laidlaw Foundation didn’t just effect change, those who knew him say – he changed how people think and the way philanthropy works.
Maybe you’ve never heard of Nathan Gilbert. Especially if you entered philanthropic circles after 2013. That’s the year, after more than three decades at its helm, Gilbert left his post as executive director of the Laidlaw Foundation. He died on September 1, 2025, at the age of 73.
In Gilbert’s obituary, you will read of “a chocolate cake–eating legend, a chicken dance innovator, and a man for whom Jewishness was synonymous with a fierce commitment to social justice and the liberation of all peoples.” You won’t read of his slow decline caused by Lewy body dementia (LBD). If you’ve ever known anyone with LBD (full disclosure: my father died of this disease), you will know there is a before-and-after version of the person. You will know what it is to witness the powerful turn powerless, the articulate turn mute, the passionate turn frustrated.
When philanthropic leaders die, it’s tempting to gloss over the messy bits and distill accomplishments into bite-sized accolades, but Gilbert’s story is bigger than that. For even if you’ve never heard of Nathan Gilbert, you know who he is. He’s there in the monthly Canada Child Benefit, the annual Vital Signs report. He’s there in a play you might go see at a local theatre. He’s there in catchphrases such as “youth-led.” Gilbert, a man book reviewer André Picard described as “too modest” while alive won’t get away with such pretenses in death. “Nathan Gilbert is still a huge force,” writes Alina Chatterjee, former senior director at Scadding Court Community Centre, in Laidlaw Foundation’s tribute.
This is a story about Gilbert in the present tense. It’s about scattering seeds on bare earth that continue to take root. And this is a story about love – where the personal spills into the professional, where you always answer your phone, where you serve on board after board after board, where, even as a degenerative disease ravages body and mind, you tell your sister “You gotta get me back. There’s things we have to do. Get a pen.”
It’s interviewee Kenneth Aliu who first mentions the L-word: “Love has never been a popular movement,” he says, quoting James Baldwin. When we look at history, “sustaining that love has only been done by a minority of people,” Aliu says. “Only a minority rise up to say, ‘This is not the right way.’”
Aliu, a 2024 Nathan Gilbert Youth Innovation Fellow who explored the impacts of the criminalization of Black youth with disabilities, sees the fellowship, created in 2014 in Gilbert’s honour, as a way to sustain this movement. Before accepting, Aliu, who holds a master’s in criminological research from Cambridge University, did his research. He learned of a 30-year-old social worker in the 1980s who transformed a small organization into a “regional powerhouse within Toronto, within Canada,” he says, focusing on social justice long before it was trendy. The fellowship recognizes that “it’s not enough for you to just have this kind of movement,” Aliu says. You need to share capital with those who continue to do the work. You also need courage.
“The arc of history doesn’t necessarily turn towards justice all the time,” Aliu says. “In fact, it’s a pendulum. It goes back and forth, right? We clash and we go back, clash and go back.” In a world of rising authoritarianism, where atrocious offences are met with impunity, where technology has become a tool of oppression, we need organizations “willing to and courageous enough to say, ‘We are going to stand for justice regardless,’” Aliu says. “And I think that would be one of the legacies that Nathan Gilbert would want to preserve. To ensure that social justice must not be placed on the altar of these people that abuse human rights.”
Or of those who quash what it means to be human. Aliu convinces me that going for a walk after our interview is as important as the lecture he’s preparing. “You have to be human at the end of the day, right? You have to understand that you’re connected to nature and everything else.” Because they do not want you to be human, Aliu says: “They want you to be a market metric.” Our “best resistance” is to be human. Go for that walk in the sun.
I learned a lot about governance from Nathan.
Ratna Omidvar, former senator
The last time Ratna Omidvar saw Gilbert, it was on a sunny day in spring: “He was walking with his wife, Myrna, on his walker, and he was still all there, not physically, but mentally.” But let’s not skip to the sad part, she says. Omidvar met Gilbert in the mid-1990s. He was the first to sign up for an anti-racism network she was creating for philanthropic leaders. “His partnership meant a great deal,” she says. Gilbert believed in inclusion “very early on, before it became a buzzword.” The former senator and president of Maytree Foundation says that “I learned a lot about governance from Nathan.”
Under his leadership, Laidlaw steered toward a focus on youth: youth and arts, youth and care, youth and policy, Omidvar says. And then he steered the foundation “towards the next step,” that “youth must be around our decision-making table as well.” Young people began to govern “some of the most sensitive decisions a foundation makes,” she says, including investment policy: “You know, managing money is always the purview of old white men, in my experience.” Gilbert helped shift that.
He also shifted perceptions surrounding foundations. “Philanthropy has always struggled to find its rightful place in our policy-making world,” Omidvar says. “You know, is it there to serve unmet needs of people? Is it there to steer policy leadership? Is it there to focus on a certain demographic? And I think Nathan demonstrated that a private foundation could be all those things.”
Alan Broadbent, the founder of Maytree Foundation, agrees. Few people were thinking about the purpose of a foundation 40 years ago, he notes. Gilbert led a brand-new way of thinking: how to serve grant recipients better, how to understand the “public obligations of private philanthropy to demonstrate public good” through transparency, through impact. Gilbert’s presence, a full-time professional employee, around boardroom tables – filled almost solely with family members or corporate associates back then – was as unusual as his approach. “In a sense, he modelled in Canada what modern foundation leadership could look like,” Broadbent says.
He modelled in Canada what modern foundation leadership could look like.
Alan Broadbent, Maytree Foundation
Gilbert was a “significant transitional person in that movement from closely held organizations into professionally managed organizations that were effective, that had impact day-to-day,” Broadbent says, from grantmaking to systems change. Gilbert was also “excellent company,” he says. “He represented Laidlaw extremely well and represented the foundation community extremely well. And, you know, he’s the kind of guy that, when you were with him, you just appreciated what a good man he was.”
For Omidvar, he was also a good neighbour. Often, she’d drive him home because “of course, Nathan didn’t have a car. That wasn’t in his wheelhouse.” She was invited to Rosh Hashanah, his son’s bar mitzvah. They became friends. “For me, he was the personification of the young Jewish activist who feels injustice not just against his own people but against many others as well.” Omidvar “lost count” of how many children he fostered. His commitment to children in care shaped the work of Laidlaw, she says, “so the personal and the political were kind of all mixed up for him.”
To understand the professional, you need to understand the personal, says Gilbert’s sister, Marcia Gilbert. Nathan had seven children, three of whom died. A newborn. A baby girl. His 39-year-old daughter. He suffered tremendous loss, Gilbert says, “but that never stopped him from picking up the pieces.” He had an open-door policy. “Young people out of nowhere would call him looking for advice.” There wasn’t a board that didn’t want him on it.
“I absolutely adored my brother,” she says. “We were best friends since childhood.” From an early age, Nathan skewed toward social justice, Gilbert says. For fun, they’d do things like write a modern-day version of the Passover story of liberation.
Sometimes people try to comfort Gilbert, saying she lost her brother years ago, but she disagrees. “I really didn’t. I loved that version of him just as much.” Yes, it was painful. Nathan was “a doer and a speaker, and someone who had an opinion” who now couldn’t speak.
But when Mayor Olivia Chow recognized Gilbert at Toronto City Hall for his role in transforming Laidlaw into “a major champion of environmental justice, community arts, and youth advocacy,” his sister saw how he’d empowered others to speak. An emotional Councillor Amber Morley, who’d benefited from Laidlaw support, said that Gilbert “continues to live on through all of us.”
“He loved Laidlaw,” Marcia says. One way he showed this was through his frugality. He’d take the train rather than fly, rarely claim a food allowance. “He’d say, ‘Every dollar that we take away from Laidlaw for me to be provided for means a dollar less to give the grantees.’”
Nathan devoted his life to Laidlaw, but at the end of the day, Gilbert says, they wanted “new blood.” His departure wasn’t easy; “I think it made him sick.” There was one secretary when Nathan started in 1982. He brought in progressive, hard-working people. It’s hard not to see the irony, that the one who insisted on youth and progress would eventually be dubbed “old school,” Gilbert says.
But no one wants to speak ill of the dead (full disclosure: this line of inquiry didn’t get far). Besides, the foundation, not ego, came first, according to his sister. He was a master of how to “let bygones be bygones,” she says. “I think he said his piece. He would say his piece and then walk away.”
Influence is affecting the way people think. Nathan’s legacy is his influence.
Irwin Elman, youth advocate
Irwin Elman, Ontario’s first independent provincial advocate for children and youth, could cite “groundbreaking” reports Gilbert authored or commissioned, campaigns he spearheaded, meetings he chaired. But at the end of the day, Elman says, people will ask, “What did he actually change? What could we point to that changed?” Yes, there are examples, such as scholarship programs for young people leaving care, which Gilbert advocated for. But there’s a difference between change and influence: “Scholarships can come and go,” Elman says. “So, change is good, but change can be changed, right? Influence is affecting the way people think. Nathan’s legacy is his influence.”
When they met through the National Youth in Care Network (now Youth in Care Canada) in the 1980s, Gilbert made an important distinction between improving the lives of children and youth and “saving them,” Elman says. Through Laidlaw, he led an organization to do more than focus on children and youth; “it focused on giving children and youth a space in which they could focus on themselves.” This was messy work, Elman notes, with “lots of debates about what that meant and how it looked.” Laidlaw, however, struggled with that “in the best sense of the word,” asking “How do we conduct philanthropy in a way that supports the people and projects we fund to have a sense of self-determination?” To struggle in that way, to do philanthropy in that way, “that’s Nathan’s legacy,” Elman says.
Today, Laidlaw is influenced in how it works because of Gilbert, Elman says. And so is he. Offering children and youth “spaces where they could have personal agency” reflects thinking that is “now part of our everyday language.” Many still struggle with how to do this work of involving young people, “particularly those most marginalized from their rights, who often are never asked,” Elman says. You can track that line of struggle to Gilbert. Without his leadership and courage, we wouldn’t be at the point where “I don’t even think I have to say why it’s important that people who are disenfranchised need spaces to have a voice and have personal agency,” Elman says. That’s a truism. And that’s Gilbert’s influence. Influence is much stronger than change because you can’t get rid of influence, Elman says. Influence lasts forever. “He’s with me forever and the way I think, and so many other people, and people who don’t even know he’s influenced them.”
Thank you to Laidlaw Foundation for their funding support of this article (with no editorial input – as Nathan would have expected). We are honoured to recognize Nathan’s contribution to Laidlaw Foundation, Agora Foundation, and the wider non-profit sector in Canada.
Nathan Gilbert was an important person in the life and evolution of Agora Foundation and its publication, The Philanthropist Journal – and like many, was brought to Agora through John Hodgson. And on a personal note, he was a friend, colleague, and mentor – and the reason I am in my role today.
In an article in The Philanthropist Journal, Nathan noted: “The Laidlaw Foundation tradition has been somewhat iconoclastic. Generally, it does not opt for the popular sentiment or follow the pack.” We think it’s an apt description of Nathan and his legacy. And we couldn’t have thought of anyone better to write this piece than Angela Long – thank you! —Leslie Wright, executive director and editor-in-chief
