Will Ginsberg at WNHH FM: It didn't all turn out the way we planned. Will Ginsberg is leaving behind important unfinished business for his successor as he completes a 24-year run as CEO of New Haven’s leading philanthropic foundation.The reliably suspender-clad Ginsberg retires from that post at the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven (CFGNH) next Friday. Karen DuBois-Walton, the housing authority CEO and longtime civic leader, is succeeding him.During his tenure the foundation’s assets grew almost four-fold to around $750 million to support hundreds of organizations in the region (including the Online Journalism Project, which publishes the Independent). Under Ginsberg’s watch, CFGNH took a lead in creating community initiatives like the New Haven Promise college scholarship and mentoring program open to all New Haven public schoolchildren, a street outreach program to tackle violence, boosts for women and minority-run small businesses, and pandemic-era responses involving the arts, hunger, and poverty. The traditionally white-dominated organization transitioned to a board led by people of color.Meanwhile, New Haven’s tech and housing sectors boomed — with much of the city still left behind.“We’re now at a time when our community is growing, and we will have an economic engine in the biotech and technology spheres coming out of Yale. So how do we make that benefit all the people in this community?” Ginsberg asked Tuesday during a career-reflection interview on WNHHFM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program.“It’s certainly a piece of unfinished business, and Karen is extremely well positioned to build on that and a lot of other things we do.”Ginsberg noted how CFGNH’s role includes not just distributing tens of millions of dollars a year to the community but also convening people from different parts of the city to work together on New Haven’s biggest challenges — like this inclusive growth challenge.“I’m leaving at a time when I don’t think our community has really fully embraced this idea of inclusive growth, at least not the way I hope that it will. … I think it’s got to come from business leadership,” from some of the biotech companies, for instance, that are filling the new downtown towers as well as Science Park.That unfinished business courses through Ginbserg’s reflections on the work he has done in New Haven and the nation’s capital over the past four decades. So much of what he and others worked hard to promote has finally come true in the tech and housing boom. So little of it has trickled down to the communities whom the policymakers believed they were striving to help, he said.Ginsberg came to New Haven in the mid-1980s to serve as development administrator under then-Mayor Biagio ​“Ben” DiLieto. That period marked the city’s first attempt to spark new housing and jobs-of-the-future booms in the wake of the mid-20th century collapse of urban economies and the failures of Urban Renewal. Ronald Reagan was president then. Even liberal cities like New Haven were moving toward an embrace of the private sector rather than the government taking the lead to rebuilding from the rubble and creating new opportunity.“The ​’70s were the bottom for these cities, the hangover, and the cities were dying. The Bronx was dying, Brooklyn was dying. New Haven was dying, and New Haven was doubly traumatized by the legacy of urban renewal and what it had done to the economy, to the physical fabric of the city as well as the economic fabric,” Ginsberg recalled. ​“It was all about public-private partnership.“Ben DiLieto, who I admired so much and still admire so much, believed in his heart that rebuilding the city physically would lead to social transformation. This is what we believed.”Ginsberg carried that belief to his next two posts: CEO of Science Park, then chief of staff to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown in the Clinton Administration.“Brown’s vision was that we were heading into the 21st century, which was going to be an era of globalization and global commerce, and that the country that was best positioned to succeed in a globalized era was the United States. … That the people who would benefit the most in this country, as trade with Africa and Asia and Latin America increased in the developing world, were Asian Americans, African Americans and Latine-Americans. That these populations would actually be the drivers of growth because of the trade we would be doing around the world. These were the articles of faith — that physical redevelopment and globalization were going to drive not only prosperity, but to use the term of today, include growth that was inclusive, including creating inclusive benefits.“I look back now. We’re a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and what has been the legacy?“America has turned inward. Countries all over have turned inward. It’s America first. It’s not about globalization.“And you look around New Haven today, and I ask myself: For all the ways in which this community has changed, physically changed, economically changed, so much for the better — how much has it created a social transformation? The poverty rate [in] New Haven in 2020, for all the progress we’ve made, was actually a little higher than the poverty rate in 1980, when this community hit bottom.”Ginsberg returned home to New Haven in 2000 and dived into the work of stitching together the goals of education, social services and culture and diversity with the realization of New Haven’s growth goals. A lot got done. As he noted Tuesday, as he settles into retirement in the city he loves like family, so much more remains to get done as a new leader assumes the mantle.Click on the video below to watch the full discussion with retiring Community Foundation for Greater New Haven CEO Will Ginsberg on WNHHFM’s ​“Dateline New Haven.” (Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of ​“Dateline New Haven.”)