At least twice, Jennifer Leonard's husband has attended events where speakers publicly described his wife as the one person everyone could trust.

That's a good thing, inasmuch as Leonard oversees charitable funds totaling $232 million in her job as president and executive director of the Rochester Area Community Foundation.

But people who know and have worked with Leonard, including her Pulitzer Prize-winning husband, David Cay Johnston, say she's more than just a trustworthy money manager.

They say Leonard's vision has expanded the role of the Community Foundation, and others nationwide, from holder of charitable funds to social catalyst. "Now you'll see a lot of women holding business meetings there," she predicted.

Said Leonard, who has been a member of the club for about a decade and on its board for five years: "It was certainly time for the club to have a female president, and I feel very fortunate that I was in line and given such serious consideration."

There has been no hoopla over the historic change. I felt six children was simply not an impediment."

Over the years, Leonard rose to vice president of the California foundation and then worked as a national consultant to community foundations for five years after Johnston took a job with the Philadelphia Inquirer. At the same time, she hatched a theory of community foundation work that involved not just collecting money left by dead people for good works, but bringing living donors together to magnify their funds for effective change.

"Jennifer had really written a paper on the ideal development of a community foundation," said restaurateur Harris "Bud" Rusitzky, a former Community Foundation board member who was on the search committee that brought Leonard to Rochester. "What she found in Rochester was the potential to fulfill that plan that she had put into theory."

Former City Council member Ruth Scott, who chaired the Community Foundation at the time, said the organization had been working on defining a broader mission even before Leonard's arrival, but Leonard made it happen.

"At one point under Jennifer, we decided we were not just a charitable foundation providing help for community groups and nonprofits," Scott said. Tom Argust, a former city commissioner of community development and longtime supporter of the Community Foundation, described how Leonard reached out to the United Way of Greater Rochester to improve what could have been seen as a competitive relationship.

Today, the two agencies are working hand-in-hand on ACT Rochester, an initiative to provide data on key community needs as a first step in solving community problems. The Gannett Foundation, a philanthropic arm of the Democrat and Chronicle's parent company, is one of the initiative's sponsors.

Such collegial relations are especially important because there are more than 160 charitable foundations in the Rochester area, some of which dwarf the Community Foundation in size.

Despite all this, Leonard is often modest about her accomplishments, immediately noting others who have contributed to any effort she's associated with.

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