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1958 — the foundation created; the gifts and estates that funded it ran to 1988 and beyond
The gift: The largest single stream of charitable money in Fort Wayne's history began as a family's lifetime giving. The Foellinger Foundation was created in 1958 by Helene Foellinger and her mother Esther A. Foellinger, and it was built the way family foundations of that era were built: the founders gave during their lives — Helene gave substantially to the foundation across her lifetime — and then gave again at death, the foundation receiving under both women's estates, with contributions from the family company, the News Publishing Company, continuing until the News-Sentinel was sold in 1980 for almost 70 million dollars. The foundation's own record, and the tax filings that carry it forward, are in the Nonprofits leg; the gift itself is the subject here: a newspaper fortune, accumulated over two generations of one family, converted by gift and bequest into a permanent endowment for the city the newspaper served.
What it built: Not a building — a funder. The foundation the Foellinger gifts created held assets of 252,344,709 dollars on its 2024 private-foundation return, paid 6,865,550 dollars in grants that year, and by its own 2025 account made 93 grants totaling 5,243,550 dollars in fiscal 2025, at a deliberate payout rate above the federal minimum. Its early-childhood program alone has distributed more than 36 million dollars. The size of the founding gifts themselves was never announced as a single figure in the record reached — the foundation grew by accumulation, gift on gift and estate on estate — and this section prints that plainly rather than inventing a founding number: what is documented is the mechanism, the dates, and the scale the gifts reached.
Sources:
- The Foellinger Foundation's own institutional history and its Form 990-PF filings (assets and grants paid, tax year 2024), as compiled in the Nonprofits leg of this history.
- Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana (ACGSI) — the News Publishing Company's 1980 sale at almost 70 million dollars.