Franklin fund to go to city students

Two hundred years to the day after Benjamin Franklin's death, Mayor Wilson Goode announced yesterday that the money Franklin bequeathed to Philadelphia in 1790 will be invested, and the income generated from the trust will be used to promote vocational education for selected city high school students. The announcement comes after several months of discussion by a special committee appointed by the mayor to decide what to do with the fund, which began as $4000 and has grown to about $2.5 million, of which the city will receive about $520,000. City Council members decided to designate the generated income to the Philadelphia Foundation, a community foundation set up to handle trusts, after hearing recommendations of the committee. The group considered over 270 written proposals and heard comments from approximately 20 Philadelphia citizens in an open forum two weeks ago. The money will be used for scholarships for high school students planning to attend vocational schools. Recipients of the scholarships will be determined by the Philadelphia school system. Ernesta Ballard, a member of the Foundation's board of managers, said that the organization was pleased to be entrusted with the funds and would pay special attention to women and minorities in distributing the scholarships. "The Philadelphia Foundation is the one organization to carry this out according to the wishes of [Franklin]," Ballard said. "This is a community foundation owned by everyone in the community." The Foundation plans to match the income it will receive from the fund and waive the fund's administrative fees for three years, which they estimated to be about five percent when they presented their request to the committee two weeks ago. Whitfield Bell, chairman of the mayor's committee, said that the process of determining who would receive Franklin's funds was "encouraging." "The opinions [on how to spend the funds] showed a remarkable unanimity," Bell said. "Half of the people wanted the money used for education, though they defined it in a broad, varied mannner." "All the requests we received were serious," he said. "There were no silly proposals and no self-serving proposals." The committee stressed that women and minorities should benefit from the fund, according to History Department Chairperson Richard Beeman, one of two University faculty members on the committee. "The people Franklin envisioned helping were married white males," Beeman said last night. "We wanted to include both men and women."

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