Mildred Leet, 88, Who Helped Empower the Poor, Dies

 

She died from complications of a fall, her daughter Aileen Robbins said.

Mrs. Leet and her husband, Glen, founded Trickle Up in 1979 with $1,000 of their own money because they thought the conventional model for foreign aid at the time — large-scale programs with benefits that would theoretically trickle down to the poor — was ineffective.

Trickle Up used local aid organizations to find the neediest people, more than 80 percent of them women, and helped them create a basic business plan. If the business plan was deemed feasible, the program granted petitioners a first installment of $50, basic business instruction and financial advice. The second installment was paid in six months if the participant and the enterprise were meeting their goals.

The charity has helped start more than 200,000 businesses, like making dolls or cooking plantain chips, in dozens of countries, including the United States, said William M. Abrams, Trickle Up’s current president. Today it operates in five: Mali, Burkina Faso, India, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Grants now range from $100 to $225.

Although microgrants and microloans are now common, critics were initially wary of Trickle Up’s approach. “A lot of people thought we were kidding ourselves,” Mrs. Leet wrote about founding the nonprofit. “They said we’d be giving away money and we’d never see a return on our investment.”

Mildred Elowsky was born in Brooklyn on Aug. 9, 1922. She graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn and received a bachelor’s degree in communications from New York University. Her first husband, Louis J. Robbins, died in 1970.

She met Glen F. Leet, the president of the Save the Children Federation, at a Red Cross fund-raiser at her Upper West Side apartment in Manhattan. They eloped in 1974. Mr. Leet died in 1998.

Mrs. Leet helped found the United States Committee for the United Nations Development Fund for Women in 1984 and later served as its vice president. In 1989, Diana, Princess of Wales, presented her with a Women of the World Award alongside Mother Teresa.

In addition to her daughter Aileen, Mrs. Leet is survived by another daughter, Jane Marla Robbins; a brother, Lawrence Elow; a granddaughter; and a great-granddaughter.