Morris Goodwin, Jr.

Morris Goodwin, Jr., learned a lot the day David Rockefeller kidnapped his mother. It was 1975, and Goodwin was a fresh-faced trainee at New York’s Chase Manhattan Bank. He was standing in the lobby, prepared to give his visiting mom a tour of the building, when Rockefeller approached the young employee and politely introduced himself. The gracious chief executive offered to show Mrs. Goodwin the executive suites and his private art collection, and his stunned staffer watched as Rockefeller whisked her away.

“I’d never been on the executive floor, and I’d been at the bank for two and a half years!” laughs Goodwin, now president and COO of The Hogan Company, a Minneapolis investment banking firm. “It struck me that there’s some nobility associated with the world’s elite class and that reaching out to people in a very honest and welcoming way is a powerful balm for some of our society’s ills.”

Rockefeller’s humanity impressed Goodwin, as did his company’s intense commitment to volunteerism and philanthropy. Goodwin himself encountered the philosophy of “giving back” as a youth observing his parents’ volunteerism at their south Minneapolis church and internalizing the “hand-up” mantra of the A Better Chance academic program that helped propel him to college. “There were lots of connections to this notion that you have a civic obligation to help others who may not have had your same opportunities,” he says.

Today Goodwin lives that notion. He’s the director of the philanthropic Minneapolis Foundation, whose work he (in true financier form) compares to that of  a “charitable portfolio manager.” He directs the Metropolitan Economic Development Association, which provides mentorship and financial services for minority-owned small businesses. Goodwin has been a MEDA board member for nearly fifteen years and a mentor to countless local entrepreneurs. As director of Twin Cities Rise!, an intense job training, counseling, and placement program, Goodwin helps to oversee one of the Twin Cities’ quietest nonprofit success stories, which he describes as a “spiritual transformation safety net.”

His activity doesn’t stop there (he has served on the boards of Minnesota Public Radio and the Minnesota Orchestra, among others), but Goodwin’s work with the organizations singled out here exemplifies the culture of contribution he has long admired, touching people at both the institutional and personal level. Rockefeller would be proud.