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The frame — service organizations are in Charities; this section is the money
The division of labor: Fort Wayne's charities feed, house, heal, mentor and perform; somebody has to pay for it, and the paying has its own history. The Charities section tells the service organizations' stories in full — the United Way of Allen County (established 1922), Big Brothers Big Sisters of Northeast Indiana, the YMCA and YWCA, Turnstone, the Rescue Mission and the rest. This section tells the other half: the foundations that hold the city's pooled charitable wealth, the corporate givers, the hospital money converted into grantmaking, the small professional infrastructure that trains and connects the sector, and the three documented attempts — 2012, 2018 and 2023 — to count the whole thing.
The shape of the money: Three structures dominate. First, the family foundations built on Fort Wayne fortunes — Foellinger (1958, newspaper), English-Bonter-Mitchell (1972, insurance stock) and their smaller peers — whose family stories are told in the Wealth section and whose grantmaking is recorded here. Second, the Community Foundation of Greater Fort Wayne, the pooled vehicle: hundreds of donor funds, agency endowments and scholarship funds administered under one roof since 1922. Third, the conversion foundations and corporate programs created by transactions — a hospital sale in 1998, a corporate reorganization in 2007, an insurer that left its hometown but kept giving to it. Underneath all three sits a workforce: by the last full count, nonprofits employed roughly one Allen County worker in twelve.
Sources:
- the Charities section of this history — the service organizations in full; cross-referenced throughout this section, not rewritten.
- the Wealth section of this history, Part Three, "The Philanthropy Dynasties" — the Foellinger, Freimann, English, McMillen and Community Foundation fortune stories this section builds on.