Community
For over a decade, Grafstein served on the Board of the League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith and the Joint Community Relations Committee of Toronto during the 60’s and 70’s.
He served as Co-Chairman of Toronto Committee for the Group of Seven Economic Summit in Toronto in 1988. He served as a member of the Executive for the Toronto 1996 and 2008 Olympic Bid Committees.
In 1998, the Grafstein Annual Lecture in Communications was established by Grafstein to commemorate the 40th anniversary of his graduation from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and the 10th anniversary of the graduation of his son, Laurence Grafstein, and daughter-in-law, Rebecca Grafstein (nee Weatherhead), both from the Class of 1988. The Grafstein Lecture is hosted by the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy at the Faculty of Law.
In 1999 he and his wife, Carole, established the Grafstein Chair in Jewish Philosophy at the University of Toronto.
Grafstein co-organized “Canada Loves New York” in November 2001, when over 26,000 Canadians visited New York City after September 11, to assist New York City’s recovery after 9/11, called “the largest peaceful invasion of Canadians since the War of 1812”.
In July 2003, he co-created and co-organized “Toronto Rocks”, considered the largest ticketed band concert in history, attended by almost 1/2 million people, to offset the negative impact on Toronto in the global media as a result of the SARS outbreak.
In December 2004 he co-organized “Canada for Asia”, a three hour broadcast telethon in aid of relief for Tsunami victims, and raised over $15,000,000.00.
Read more about this topic: Jerry Grafstein
Famous quotes containing the word community:
“As blacks, we need not be afraid that encouraging moral development, a conscience and guilt will prevent social action. Black children without the ability to feel a normal amount of guilt will victimize their parents, relatives and community first. They are unlikely to be involved in social action to improve the black community. Their self-centered personalities will cause them to look out for themselves without concern for others, black or white.”
—James P. Comer (20th century)
“Every community is an association of some kind and every community is established with a view to some good; for everyone always acts in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“I do not mean to imply that the good old days were perfect. But the institutions and structure—the web—of society needed reform, not demolition. To have cut the institutional and community strands without replacing them with new ones proved to be a form of abuse to one generation and to the next. For so many Americans, the tragedy was not in dreaming that life could be better; the tragedy was that the dreaming ended.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)