Sally Lilienthal (1919-2006) founder of Ploughshares Fund, was born on March 19, 1919.
Sally Lilienthal was on a quest to change the world. It was 1981, and she had invited public service leader Lew Butler and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Owen Chamberlain down the wooden staircase to a living room balcony extending over a San Francisco cliff below.
Chamberlain, one of the world’s quietest people, spoke up: “There are lot of problems in the world. There’s one that’s so much bigger than all the others: nuclear weapons. If we can’t get rid of them, it will destroy civilization.”
“There was silence. Then there was a consensus,” recalls Butler. “We had a foundation.”
Within its first year, Ploughshares Fund had 62 donors and awarded $150,000 in grants aimed at eliminating nuclear weapons.
“When you’re talking about something as cosmic as a nuclear war,” said Sally, “it is harder to become personally and emotionally involved. That week, Lew and I had lunch in a Chinese restaurant and I got a fortune cookie that said, ‘You will best succeed in some profession consecrated to the service of humanity.’ I kept it taped on my desk at home.”
Forty years later, Sally’s vision of service to humanity lives on through the vision and mission of Ploughshares Fund.
Sally’s vision of service to humanity lives on.
