Advancing social justice for more than seventy years.
Public Welfare Foundation was founded in 1947 by Charles Edward Marsh to make “gifts for education, charitable or benevolent uses in accordance with a plan which shall meet the changing need for such gifts with flexibility….”
The Foundation’s first grant was made in 1948 – 28 sewing machines for an organization of Jamaican women, so that the island’s poor children could be clothed and sent to school. The Foundation followed up with funding for scholarships and occupational training, medical equipment, clinics and – ahead of the times – micro-loans for fishermen. As the Foundation grew, Marsh built a network of “agents” assigned to find worthwhile recipients: among them, according to Kopper, the young Indira Gandhi, Mother Teresa and the playwright Noel Coward.
In its 70-year history, the Foundation has distributed more than $570 million in grants to more than 4,800 organizations. With current assets of more than $480 million, Public Welfare makes grants nationwide and focuses its grant making in some difficult, and often overlooked, social justice areas where it believes it can serve as a catalyst for reform.
Charles Edward Marsh landed his first job in 1909, as a $25-a-week rookie reporter for a small Oklahoma newspaper. A born entrepreneur, he scraped together $2,500, partnered with brothers E.S. and Charles E. Fentress and built the Marsh-Fentress newspaper chain. As his fortune swelled, he retained strong populist views.
During the Roosevelt era, Marsh moved from Texas to a mansion off Washington’s DuPont Circle and an estate in the Virginia hunt country, where he entertained influential political and intellectual figures. A restless and adventurous soul, after the war, Marsh traveled the world.
In 1947, he made a formal commitment to philanthropy by incorporating the Public Welfare Foundation and designating it to receive his newspapers’ assets upon his death. He deliberately chose a vague name to allow the Foundation to evolve with the times. According to Anonymous Giver, a biography of Marsh by Philip Kopper, Marsh wrote that “public welfare” was “a pretty wide pair of words,” by which he intended the Foundation to involve itself in “any activity which would promote the well-being and happiness of human beings.”
Marsh oversaw the Foundation’s work until his health began to decline in 1953. He died in 1964. Claudia Haines Marsh, his third wife, was the Foundation’s president from 1952 to 1974, and she remained a guiding influence until her own death, at the age of 100, in the year 2000.