Missing-You Robert Joseph Ledogar, RIP - Obituary by his family

Shared by Robert Cohen

Robert Joseph Ledogar

Author, Teacher and Humanitarian

Robert Ledogar died peacefully on July 2nd surrounded by family, in Northampton Massachusetts.

Ledogar was born in New York City on August 3rd, 1933 and served for five years as professor of theology and liturgy at the Maryknoll Seminary in Ossining, NY. He held Masters and Doctoral degrees from the Institut Catholique de Paris.

His father, Edward John Ledogar, was an attorney and his mother, the former Margaret Meany, was a homemaker. He was predeceased by his brothers Edward and Stephen and his sister Anne.

By the late 1960s, he was struggling with his vocation. Gradually, he lost faith in the Catholic God that counted every hair on every head. Regarding his training and his priesthood, Ledogar stated that "far from being wasted years, they were for me happy ones in which I learned a great deal and was well-positioned for the career that followed." His career focused on solving real problems and alleviating the suffering he saw so much of.

He left the priesthood in 1969; worked for the United Nations briefly before receiving a Loula D. Lasker Foundation Fellowship to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he received a master's degree in Urban Planning.

Ledogar met Eleanor Price in May of 1971 and they married ten months later. They shared fifty years of love and companionship until her death in 2021.

Post-graduation he worked as a consultant for Consumers Union, resulting in a book, Hungry for Profits, published in 1975, introduced by Ralph Nader. The book exposed the ways multi-national corporations affected the lives of ordinary people in Latin America. Ledogar called the book an exploration of the limits of corporate responsibility. As a result of the work, Ledogar testified before a US Senate subcommittee in 1976 on the behavior of the multinational drug industry in developing countries.

From 1976 to 1979, Ledogar served as Field Director for the American Friends Service Committee in Lusaka, Zambia followed by ten years in the UNICEF area office for Central America and six years as Senior Programme Officer in the Planning Office at UNICEF headquarters.

In 1995, he became Associate Executive Director of CIET International, a global network of non-profit training and research organizations. He worked on numerous intercultural epidemiological projects in Latin America, South Asia, and Africa, and on community-level evidence in planning in Nigeria. For more than a decade, he supported the Brooklyn-based El Puente organization focused on high-impact youth and community development. His abiding interest was in gathering and using reliable information for action on causes of illness and hunger in disadvantaged communities. A highly respected visiting professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero in Mexico, he brought his extensive practical experience into teaching and supervising students in the MSc and DSc programs.

He leaves numerous nieces, nephews, and friends on every continent.