The Greater Cleveland Associated Foundation (GCAF, or the Associated Foundation) was a community foundation established in 1961 in Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States to assist other private and community foundations in and around Cleveland in establishing priorities and working to find solutions to pressing social needs. After its second round of funding, GCAF leaders merged the foundation with The Cleveland Foundation, an organization which GCAF had greatly influenced. Creating GCAF Idea for a new foundation The Cleveland Foundation was far and away Cleveland's largest community foundation in the 1960s. But many individuals felt that the organization had become staid and fusty. Among these were Kent Smith a chemical engineer and retired president of the Cleveland Graphite Oil Products Company (later renamed Lubrizol Corporation), and Harold Clark, a local Cleveland attorney who was executor of the estate of Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. (a partner and director of Hanna Mining). Clark had also spent most of the 1940s and 1950s on The Cleveland Foundation's Distribution Committee, which approved grants to local organizations. By 1960, Smith had become a member of the Distribution Committee. Both men believed that The Cleveland Foundation's grantmaking was too routinized and not responsive to the changing needs of people in the area. They also believed the foundation had lost sight of its original goal: Producing cutting-edge research designed to spark progressive social change. Political scientist Paul N. Ylvisaker was head of the Public Affairs Program at the Ford Foundation. The program was committed to studying the problems of urban areas and financing pilot project to help solve them. In late 1960, Ylvisaker was in the process of finalizing a $1.25 million grant to the Kansas City Association of Trusts and Foundations (later renamed the Kansas City Community Foundation) to help that body revitalize its research and grant-making agenda. About the same time, Ylvisaker began talking to Harold Clark about how the Public Affairs Program might make a similarly sized grant to a Cleveland-area organization. Homer Wadsworth, head of the Kansas City foundation, urged Ylvisaker to make the grant, so that it would not appear as if the Ford Foundation were favoring Kansas City. To lead the new foundation, Ylvisaker recommended Dr. James Adolphus "Dolph" Norton, his college roommate at Harvard University and by 1961 a political scientist at Case Institute of Technology. In February 1961, Ylvisaker contacted T. Keith Glennan, president of Case, to ask him to