Frances Southworth Goff was in every respect the equal of her husband, Frederick Harris Goff. A woman of character and intelligence, she came from a family that helped to settle the portion of northeastern Ohio called the Western Reserve. Her father, William Palmer Southworth, a carpenter who arrived in Cleveland in 1836 and became a builder and small contractor, was credited with laying Cleveland’s first sidewalks and waterlines. After the Civil War, W. P. opened a general store near Public Square, the city’s downtown commons. Frances’s mother, Louisa (née Stark), was active in the suffrage movement and once headed an effort to secure signatures for women’s right to vote.

Sent by her parents to Vassar College (class of 1886), Frances Goff married Fred Goff in 1894, when she was 30 and he was 36. In addition to rearing three children, she fulfilled her role as the wife of a prominent citizen by engaging in good works. Frances was a founder of the Federation for Charity and Philanthropy, organized in January 1913 at the behest of the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce to coordinate funding of the city’s social service agencies. The federation had a 30-member board, one-third of whom had been selected by chamber officials to represent the city at large.

Mrs. Goff’s familiarity with the federation’s attempt to provide for public representation may account for her sympathetic response to an observation by a Cleveland Press editorial writer named Livy S. Richard that the Cleveland Trust board was not necessarily the best qualified judge of how to distribute the Cleveland Foundation’s funds. Fred Goff, who had sought feedback on his community trust concept from a wide range of sources, had initially dismissed Richard’s recommendation that money meant for the use of the people should be controlled by the people as “nut radicalism.” But when he showed his wife the letter he had received from the newspaperman, Frances responded, “Fred, I believe that fellow is right.” Goff revised his plan for the foundation’s governance accordingly.

The year after Fred Goff’s death in 1923, Frances Goff was appointed to the Cleveland Foundation board (then called the Foundation Committee) by the mayor of Cleveland, John D. Marshall. Reappointed by Marshall and his two successors, she served on the board for nearly two decades, during which time she responded capably and wholeheartedly to the call to transform her late husband’s dreams and hopes for the usefulness of the Cleveland Foundation into reality. In contemporary terms, you might say she “got it,” writing in 1926 that the role of a community foundation was not just to support “good work being done, but to blaze new highways of progress, to do things in educational, social and civic work which challenge the imagination and arouse the ambition of the community.”

In addition to performing the Foundation Committee’s customary grantmaking duties, to which she is said to have brought a deep understanding of human needs, independence of thought and sound judgment, Goff personally interviewed hundreds of young men and women who applied to the Cleveland Foundation for scholarship aid. She conscientiously helped to draft evaluations of each candidate to be considered by the Foundation Committee.

Frances Goff resigned from the committee in 1942 at the age of 78. She explained that she could not in good conscience serve beyond the time when her usefulness to the foundation was in any way impaired. Leonard P. Ayres, whose tenure on the board overlapped with that of Mrs. Goff, paid a heartfelt tribute to his esteemed colleague, stating, “In the 14 years during which Mrs. Goff and I served together on the Committee, the members were of two classes, and Mrs. Goff constituted the entire first class.”

Goff died on July 12, 1956, having mourned the loss of her daughter, Frances Goff Thoburn, two years earlier. She was survived by son William S. Goff and daughter Freda Goff Waterworth, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.