In Memoriam
MARK BALSAM

Mark Balsam, a lifelong progressive political activist who was among the first generation of social therapists and a dedicated builder of the All Stars Project, the East Side Institute and their development community, passed away on August 10, 2023. He was 82 years old. The causes were bone marrow cancer and kidney failure.

Mark was born in 1941 in New York City, into a radically political family. His parents took him to demonstrations from the time he was a toddler, and he never ceased his dedication to and activism for a more equitable, peaceful and developmental world. After graduating from Long Island University in 1967, Mark earned a master’s degree in rehabilitation counseling from New York University in 1971 and went on to work at Hillside Psychiatric Hospital [now the Zucker Hillside Hospital] in Glen Oaks, Queens. Frustrated that patients were being commodified and not getting well, Mark looked for an alternative to helping those in emotional pain. He responded to an ad in the Village Voice, a New York City weekly paper, for a training program in “Marxist therapy” and joined the first cohort of the Social Therapy Training Program of the New York Institute for Social Therapy and Research [now the East Side Institute] from which he graduated in 1981.

Mark in the first graduating class of the Social Therapy Training Program

During the initial period of social therapy’s expansion in the New York metropolitan area, in the 1980s, Mark became the director ofthe Lower Manhattan Center for Social Therapy where he worked closely with current East Side Institute staff Ann Green and Jeff Aron. Mark later brought out social therapeutics and his capacity to create developmental environments to the Somerset Community Action Program in New Jersey where, working with director Gloria Strickland, he led its Head Start Program through the mid-1990s. After that, he spent much of his professional life as director of the Chelton Loft, a voluntary club house in midtown Manhattan for people with histories of serious mental illness. Mark brought social therapeutics to the Loft, providing what he called a “performatory lease on life” to its members. He was much loved by staff and members of the clubhouse community.

For the last ten years of his life, Mark worked part-time as a receptionist at the All Stars Project’s performance and development center on 42nd Street in Manhattan. He was also, as a volunteer, a stalwart of UX, the All Stars’ free development school for people of all ages. He supervised the UX Wednesday night phone shift for many years and did outreach for the school on the phones and the streets. His fellow volunteers, most working-class adults of color who were students at UX, found inspiration in his dedication, modesty and friendliness. When UX was closed by the COVID pandemic, Mark joined the Advisory Board for “Let’s Learn” a free Zoom-enabled global teaching/learning community that is a joint project of Lloyd International Honors College of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the East Side Institute.

When Mark became ill with cancer in December 2021, inspired by the social therapeutic health teams originated by the Institute, he organized a health team of friends and relatives to work with him during his illness. The team, with members all over the country, met via Zoom bi-weekly and eventually, as the illness progressed, weekly. The team was with him and his life partner Jessica Marta the evening before he passed away.

Mark with life partner Jessica Marta

Mark was curious about and deeply loved people, and that curiosity and love fueled his activism and his life. He had the ability to be at ease with and talk to all sorts of people across lines of ethnicity, class, and age. He was deeply loved and respected for his hard work, humility, and his ability to be giving in our culture of getting. He will be missed by his extensive extended family, as well as by his massive network of friends, comrades, and colleagues at the East Side Institute, the All Stars Project, and beyond.