Obituaries: Peter Goldberg, 63, Led Families International; Ruth Brinker, 89, Started Early AIDS Charity

Peter Goldberg, longtime head of the nonprofit social-service alliance Families International, died of a heart attack Friday while hiking in Maine, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He was 63.

Mr. Goldberg served 17 years as chief executive of Families International, a Milwaukee network of more than 360 groups that provides residential care for children, substance-abuse prevention, and other family-based services. He was frequently ranked among the nation’s most influential nonprofit executives and contributed occasional opinion articles to The Chronicle of Philanthropy. (See the one he wrote just days before he died.)

Before he joined Families International, Mr. Goldberg held several jobs in government and at foundations, including a stint as president of the Prudential Foundation.

Ruth Brinker, who founded one of the first charities to help gay men with AIDS, died last week at age 89 of dementia-related complications, the San Francisco Chronicle writes.

Ms. Brinker launched Project Open Hand in San Francisco in 1985 to provide meals for AIDS sufferers who had become too weak to cook for themselves. The charity, which she led into the early 1990s before she retired, today serves almost 2,600 meals daily to the elderly and people with AIDS, breast cancer, and other debilitating illnesses.