The organization’s president, Kerry Kennedy, said the trip inspired Mr. Minerd to help create and fund a program for immigrants and refugees in the United States. In one instance it lobbied successfully on behalf of 40,000 Cameroonian and 250,000 Haitian refugees who had sought to remain in the country under temporary protective status.
In 2008, Mr. Minerd learned that Union Rescue Mission, a nonprofit that feeds and houses homeless families in Los Angeles, was short on funds and was considering closing one of its residences. He toured the facility and wrote a check for $272,000, said the nonprofit’s chief executive, the Rev. Andy Bales. Since then, Mr. Minerd had donated $27 million to the mission.
The financier Michael Milken, a friend of Mr. Minerd’s who spoke at his funeral, wrote in an email that the two had often discussed “our joint belief in the capacity of finance to be a force for the betterment of society.”
Byron Scott Minerd was born on March 23, 1959, in Connellsville, Pa., to Byron Kendall and Carol (Mitchell) Minerd. His mother was a homemaker, and his father, who was known as Kenny, worked as an insurance agent and spent 40 years employed by what became CSX Railroad.
Mr. Minerd was raised in nearby Chalk Hill, a rural mountain town near the West Virginia border with fewer than 200 residents. After taking classes at the local outpost of Pennsylvania State University, he transferred to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1980 with a bachelor’s degree in economics.
He started his career as an accountant at what is now PricewaterhouseCoopers but switched to finance, joining Merrill Lynch, which was then a brokerage firm, in New York in 1983. After five years, he joined Morgan Stanley to lead its fixed-income group in Europe before returning to New York in 1994 to run a similar unit at Credit Suisse focused on North America.
Sumber: www.nytimes.com
