Gandhian Foundation (U.S.)

Founded in 1958 by Thomas R. Evans, Robert W. Gilmore, Sheldon G. Weeks, and William A. DeLano as a nonprofit trust fund exclusively for religious, charitable, and educational purposes, to support study and research into nonviolent social change. Three of these trustees were Quakers. Charles Bloomstein was also a trustee. The office was headquartered at the New York Friends Group Inc. in New York City. By the end of the 1980s it had become inactive and the trustees transferred the Foundation to a group of Quakers in Philadelphia who were associated with Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. On Dec. 20, 1990 it was reorganized with a new Board. Three trustees were elected: Lillian and George Willoughby and George Lakey. The office was moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It 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 Dec. 2004 the trustees were Michael Beer, George Willoughby, David Grant and John Lapham; the office was located in Deptford, New Jersey.