Ben Franklin Advances Learning
In 1743, Benjamin Franklin brought into being an idea originally hatched by his friend John Bartram, one of the colonies’ most distinguished naturalists. Their joint vision was a “society to Read more…
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Improving the Almshouse
In 1766, a group of Quaker merchants formed the Committee to Alleviate the Miseries of the Poor and won a charter to take over operation of Philadelphia’s miserable almshouse from Read more…
Franklin’s Network for Good
In 1727, just 21 years old and cut off from his own family, Ben Franklin began his first experiment in voluntary association, thereby helping deepen America’s most distinctive characteristic. He Read more…
The Continent’s First Ethnic Charity
When 28 “Scottish men” signed the “Laws, Rules, and Order of the Poor Boxes Society” in Boston on January 6, 1657, they formed one of America’s first charities, and one Read more…
Private Donations to Settle Freed Slaves
At the end of the Civil War, Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands to resettle former slaves on empty plots, and otherwise help African Americans uprooted Read more…
Scouting Improves Boys and Girls
Founded in 1910 as part of an international movement, the Boy Scouts of America enrolled 2.4 million youth members in 2014, reached another 422,000 children receiving character education from the Read more…
Mormon Welfare System
In the teeth of the Great Depression, leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the Mormons—created what has become America’s broadest private system of economic aid to persons Read more…
Rescuing Refugees
In the last decades of the nineteenth century, anti-Semitic riots in Russia and Eastern Europe killed many Jews, and caused hundreds of thousands of Jewish families to leave or be Read more…
Scholarships for Engineers
The School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, one of the top-rated institutions of its kind, was strengthened further in 2014 by a gift from an alum Read more…
Shot in the Arm for Public Health
Gerald Chan worked on a master’s degree and then a doctorate at the School of Public Health at Harvard in the 1970s. After that he pursued medical research for a Read more…
Putting Psychiatry on the Map
As early as 1914 the Rockefeller Foundation had dabbled in what was then called “mental hygiene,” but in the 1930s the foundation became the driving force that built psychiatry into Read more…
Ronald McDonald Houses
When Fred Hill’s three-year-old was fighting leukemia, he and his family passed hours and days sleeping in chairs and living off vending-machine food as they kept vigil with her in Read more…
New York Dispensary
New York City clergyman John Rodgers was a classic charitable leader who honed his coalition-building skills as president of the Society for the Relief of Distressed Debtors, vice-chancellor of the Read more…
Leading a Charge Against Psychiatric Disorders
Ted Stanley was a pioneer in mental-health philanthropy. Back in the late-1980s the billionaire retailer founded the Stanley Medical Research Institute, which quickly became the biggest private backer in the Read more…
Rehabilitating Arlington
When Robert E. Lee sided with his state instead of his nation and took command of the Confederate army, the U.S. seized his family estate located on a hill overlooking Read more…
To Create a Mockingbird
When Harper Lee decided to try to make it as a writer, she relocated (like many before her and since) to New York City. When she got there she found Read more…
Suing for Reform
Philanthropists have been funding lawsuits as a way to improve public policies for more than a century. Booker T. Washington secretly financed the Giles v. Harris case back in 1903, Read more…
Supreme Assistance
The Searle Freedom Trust was founded in 1998 by Dan Searle with proceeds from the sale of the G. D. Searle pharmaceutical company. The foundation has been a major funder Read more…
A Bit of Diversity in the Faculty Lounge
The University of Colorado at Boulder is famous as a citadel of “progressivism,” for which it is sometimes referred to as the “Berkeley of the Rockies.” All faculty members, for Read more…
Avoiding Meltdowns of Public Pensions
The public-pension gap—the retiree and health benefits that have been promised to government workers but not funded—is the single gravest economic threat to the U.S. today. That is the position Read more…