Samuel S. Fels Fund |
Home | Guidelines & Applications | 2008 Summer Internships in Community Service | Recent Grants | Staff & Trustees
The Samuel S. Fels Fund was founded in 1935 by Samuel S. Fels, a Philadelphia philanthropist who made his money in the manufacture of Fels Naptha, a popular household soap. We are a private independent foundation with broad interests in community programs, education and the arts.
According to our charter, we seek to support projects “which prevent, lessen or resolve contemporary social problems”, or which seek to provide permanent improvements “in human daily life”.
THE SAMUEL S. FELS FUND
HISTORY AND PURPOSE
The Samuel S. Fels Fund was incorporated as a Pennsylvania nonprofit corporation on December 17, 1935. The Charter was accepted and the foundation’s work begun at the organizational meeting on January 27, 1936.
The Fund’s founder was Samuel S. Fels, Philadelphia philanthropist and civic leader who was president of Fels & Company, manufacturer of Fels Naptha, a vastly popular household soap. Sam Fels was born in Yanceyville, North Carolina in 1860 and died in Philadelphia on June 23, 1950.
The general purpose of the Fund, as stated in the Charter, is “to initiate and to assist any activities or projects of a scientific, educational or charitable nature which tend to improve human daily life and to bring to the average person greater health, happiness, and a fuller understanding of the meaning and purposes of life.”
To this end the Fund makes grants in the categories of Arts and Humanities, Education, Community Programs, and Health, all in the city of Philadelphia. The ideal proposal to Fels is one that addresses positive social change. We also mean to be useful to organizations at points of particular need such as expansion, experimentation, or reorganization or in times of particular need for advocacy. The Fund is unable to make grants to individuals and accepts proposals only from organizations which are designated tax-exempt (501-c-3) by the Internal Revenue Service. The Fund does not make grants for conferences, scholarships, fellowships or travel. Ordinarily, the Fund also avoids making grants for major programs of large institutions, capital and equipment, endowment, and the routine or direct services of social service agencies. Individual day care and after school care programs and computer centers cannot be accommodated, although agencies that serve these fields may apply.
The Fund also runs an annual program, the Fels Internships in Community Service. Recent grantees are invited to submit descriptions of projects that could be done by graduate students over the course of ten weeks in the summer. Organizations whose projects are selected receive $6,000 to pay the graduate students, whom they select. The program is a way to draw talent to the not-for-profit sector and to carry out serious work on the community’s behalf.
Applications are accepted at any time (with the exception of Arts and Humanities projects which are due by 5 p.m. on January 15th or May 15th). Agencies are asked to refrain from reapplying for a year after the proposal has been declined or until a final report has been accepted if a grant was awarded. Guidelines for applicants, with proposal requirements and cover sheet, are available on our website or by calling (215) 731-9455.
Letter from the President and Executive Director
The year 2007 was a productive one for the Fels Fund. We made 192 grants and spent $2,073,300. Noteworthy among our 2007 grants is the high number of New Director’s Grants – seven, compared to two in 2006. Julia Lopez at Centro Pedro Claver; Kim Sajet at the Pennsylvania Historical Society; Robert Groves at the Philadelphia Senior Center; Dani-Ella Betz, the first full time director at Wissahickon Restoration Volunteers and Nijmie Dzurinko at Philadelphia Student Union are new directors who are making progress with their institutions. Two directors, Rebecca Fabiano at Woodrock and Diane Gentry at Philadelphia City Sail arrived on their jobs full of hope only to find that board commitment and financial stability were absent. Both directors closed their operations, regrettable but entirely appropriate decisions. Such is the down side to taking a risk on a shaky organization. We are proud of the risks we take and we plan to keep on taking them.We set aside one board meeting a year for the discussion of policies that affect our grant making. In 2006 we looked hard at our operating costs. In 2007 we decided to tackle big questions of self evaluation; pro-active grants; and mission-related investing. Embedded in each of these topics are numerous other questions. Let us take them one by one.
Self-evaluation. We ask all grantees to self-evaluate, to tell us how they will know if they have “succeeded” in having spent Fels money effectively. Shouldn’t we evaluate ourselves? We read the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s “Turning the Table on Assessment” and “Beyond the Rhetoric: Foundation Strategy” and Stanford Social Innovation Review’s “Smart Money” and examined ourselves in the context of how other foundations behave. We considered where we were on a continuum of funding styles ranging from “charitable banker” to “perpetual adjuster” to “partial strategist” to “total strategist”. By the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s definition we are a partial strategist, i.e. we have both broad goals such as “provide improvements in human daily life” from our founder and specific goals such as “improve the lives of the least fortunate” by funding services to immigrants which we have enumerated.
Once defined, we proceeded to look at the degree to which we actually carry out what we say we do in our guidelines. If the least fortunate are the primary target of our funding how much of our 2006 and 2007 dollars went to them? The answer is 75% of our Community grants with the remaining 25% benefiting all citizens. Similarly, 75% of our grants in Education went to organizations serving the public schools in Philadelphia and the balance of 25% to programs that benefit all citizens. In the Arts our stated goal is to serve emerging, small, and medium sized organizations. It turns out that Arts grants in 2006 and 2007 went to 60% small and 40% medium sized organizations. After looking at the match between our stated goals and our actual grantmaking we felt satisfied that we are indeed following our own guidelines, hewing to our strategies.
Other issues that surfaced in this discussion were 1) should we limit the number of years an organization can get grants from us; we decided not to limit that number, but to make clear to our grantees not to expect permanent funding; 2) should we raise the size of the minimum grant, currently at $3,000, to $5,000; we decided to leave it at $3,000 since grants that small still have meaning for the very small and start-up Arts organizations. We also considered 3) whether we should make all of our grants for general operating support. We decided that since currently a healthy 75% of our grants are for general operating support it is probably wise to reserve the right to target a grant for a special purpose from time to time.
Pro-active grants. The question here is whether we remain responsive, meaning should we just react to proposals that arrive in the mail (in response to our guidelines) or should we be pro-active and seek proposals to address a particular topic. Fels has done such work in the past, most notably by trying to encourage parental involvement in the public schools. That work produced mixed results and consumed dollars that couldn’t go to other organizations. We discussed this at length and concluded that the quality of the proposals we are currently receiving is high, that we are unable to fund all the high quality proposals that do match our guidelines, and finally, that we do not feel a mandate to forsake our current interests for any particular issue. We will remain reactive.
Mission related investing. Here we looked at the question of whether we should be using the money – approximately $53 million at the close of 2007 – we have in our endowment to do good, not just to produce the income to make grants. We read about others’ results in the Mission-Related and Socially-Responsible Investing worlds and we took the temperature of our board on these topics. In the end we took two conservative actions: one, we made investments of $100,000 each in The Reinvestment Fund and The Nonprofit Finance Fund and two, we set up a committee, chaired by the able David Wice to spend 2008 looking more deeply into the issue.
After we had examined our practices, we reflected that we were making very few changes, but that the exercise had been a healthy one. Our board added a new Member-Director in 2007. The talented Valerie Clayton joined us. Clayton directs the Settlement Music School’s Camden campus. She brings a wealth of experience in music and education and she has already proved herself to be a thoughtful team player. We are proud to have Clayton helping us make good grants.
| Sandra Featherman | Helen Cunningham |
| President | Executive Director |