Remembering Ed Kushner
The Bainbridge Community Foundation joins our community in mourning the loss of Ed Kushner, and in celebrating a life that helped shape the Bainbridge Island we know today.
There are people who live in a community, and there are people who help build one.
Ed was a builder.
Not principally of buildings, although some of the places that bear the imprint of his work remain very much with us. What Ed built were connections. Possibilities. Institutions. He had a remarkable ability to look at something our community needed and move quickly past the question of whether it could be done to the much more useful question: How are we going to do it?
And then he found people to do it with him.
Bainbridge Community Foundation is one of those institutions.
Ed served on BCF’s founding board. Twenty-five years ago, when a small group of Islanders began imagining what a community foundation could mean for Bainbridge, Ed was among the people who helped carve that vision. He understood that a stronger community needed more than individual acts of generosity. It needed ways to bring people together, to connect resources with needs, and to give all of us a way to take some responsibility for the place we share.
That instinct can be seen throughout Ed’s life.
After the death of his friend Marge Williams, Ed imagined that her home could become something lasting: a place where the people doing the often-unseen work of strengthening Bainbridge could work alongside one another. Twenty-five years later, the Marge Williams Center remains an affordable home for nonprofits and a quiet monument to the power of turning grief into something useful and enduring.
When residents of the Islander Mobile Home Park faced the possibility of losing their homes, Ed and others helped assemble the people and financing that allowed residents to purchase the property themselves. It was complicated work, much of it invisible to the wider community. But dozens of families were able to remain in their homes because Ed and others decided that losing them from our community was not an acceptable outcome.
And when BCF began looking for new ways philanthropy could address the growing challenge of affordable housing, Ed helped found our Housing Action Fund. It was an innovative idea: use charitable dollars not only to make grants, but in ways that could be recovered and put to work again on the next housing challenge. Ed served on its advisory committee and helped BCF think differently about what community philanthropy could accomplish.
There is a thread running through all of this. Ed didn’t wait for someone else to solve a problem. He gathered people, figured out what resources were available, and got to work.
Perhaps no moment captures Ed quite as well as the night BCF honored him in 2009.
That year, Ed was selected from 30 nominees across Kitsap County to receive the C. Keith Birkenfeld Humanitarian Award. The award came with $25,000 that the recipient could direct to a nonprofit organization.
One organization.
Ed, naturally, had another idea.
He divided the award among five.
Helpline House. Housing Resources Board. The Japanese American Exclusion Memorial. The Bainbridge-Ometepe Sister Islands Association. The Marge Williams Center.
Housing. Human dignity. History. Connection. Community.
Even when the moment was intended to recognize Ed, he found a way to turn the attention, and the resources, toward others.
In recognizing him that evening, then-BCF President Tom Croker spoke of Ed’s compassion, his hands-on attitude and his ability to lead, saying that Ed’s volunteer work had “literally touched thousands of residents.”
Seventeen years later, those words seem almost understated.
Because Ed’s legacy isn’t contained in a list of organizations, awards or projects. It is present in the lives that unfolded because those organizations were stronger. In a family that could remain on Bainbridge. In someone who found help when they needed it. In a nonprofit that could afford an office and concentrate more of its resources on its mission. In a piece of our history that was preserved. In friendships formed across cultures. And in countless people who learned from Ed that caring about a place also means accepting some responsibility for what happens to it.
That idea is particularly meaningful to us at Bainbridge Community Foundation because Ed helped place it at the heart of who we are.
For 25 years, BCF has been built on a simple belief: none of us creates a strong community alone. We inherit things from the people who came before us. We care for them for a while. We add what we can. And eventually, we entrust them to the people who come next.
Ed understood that bargain exceptionally well.
He gave generously, certainly. But perhaps more importantly, he participated generously.
He lent his judgment. His relationships. His persistence. His imagination. His credibility. His time. And, whenever necessary, his willingness to pick up the phone and persuade someone else to participate too.
That is philanthropy in its deepest sense. Not simply generosity, but love of community translated into action.
There is profound sadness in losing someone who has been part of the civic fabric of Bainbridge for so long.
But there is also something comforting in realizing how difficult it would be to remove Ed Kushner from this community now.
He is woven into it.
He is there in organizations he helped create and strengthen, in places he helped preserve, in families who were able to remain here, in people who learned from his example, and in ideas that became realities because Ed was willing to say: We can do something about this.
Twenty-five years ago, he helped create Bainbridge Community Foundation because he believed this community could accomplish more when we acted together.
BCF had the privilege of honoring Ed during his lifetime. We have had the even greater privilege of carrying forward a vision he helped create.
Today, we simply say thank you.
Thank you, Ed, for showing us what it means not merely to live in a community, but to live in community: to care for one another, to take responsibility for the place we share, and to leave something behind for those who come next.
That is a life well lived. And that is a legacy that will endure.
Ed’s family has requested memorial gifts be made to Housing Resources Bainbridge or “Ed’s Housing Community Fund” at Bainbridge Community Foundation, which will continue Ed’s work in the community.
