Gandhian Foundation Records

The Gandhian Foundation founded in 1958 by Thomas Evans, Robert Gilmore, Sheldon Weeks, and William DeLano as a nonprofit trust fund exclusively for religious, charitable, and educational purposes. Three of these trustees were Quakers. The office was located in the New York Friends Group Inc. building on East 18th Street, New York City. For years the Foundation was involved in several projects that reflected the concerns and interests of the founders. By the end of the 1980s it had become inactive and the trustees transferred the Foundation to a group of Quakers in Philadelphia. On December 20, 1990 it was reorganized with a new Board. Three trustees were elected: Lillian Willoughby, George Willoughby, and George Lakey. All were members of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. The office was moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Gandhian Foundation provided fiscal sponsorship to the Scholarship Project of Training for Change, a Philadelphia-based social change training center, and several other small groups engaged in experimental nonviolent social change. The Foundation also administered the Activist Retirement Fund, established by friends and supporters of Training for Change. In December 2004 the trustees were Michael Beer, George Willoughby, David Grant and John Lapham; the office was located in Deptford, New Jersey.