Belle Sherwin (see video) served on the foundation’s board from 1917 until 1924, and she and her sister, Prudence, added substantially to the foundation’s pool of unrestricted monies with testamentary gifts (worth $6.5 million at the time of Belle’s death in 1955) that created the Henry A. Sherwin and Frances M. Sherwin Memorial Fund at the foundation in honor of their parents. But Belle’s informal influence on the foundation’s work was just as significant. Acting in her capacity as president of the Cleveland Welfare Council, it was she who suggested the topic of the foundation’s first municipal survey: “poor relief,” a cause to which she was especially devoted. She also recommended that the foundation hire Raymond Moley as its first full-time director.
After assuming the welfare council’s presidency in April 1914, Miss Sherwin had convened community meetings to discuss the increasing demands being placed on the city’s private and public relief agencies by a severe recession that year. Faced in the fall of 1914 with the imminent prospect of the entire system running out of funds, Sherwin asked the Cleveland Foundation’s survey director Allen Burns, who was a member-at-large of the welfare council, to consider commissioning a study of how to strengthen the city’s relief effort. The foundation’s Survey Committee approved this request, and Burns hired Sherman C. Kingsley, director of the Elizabeth McCormick Memorial Fund of Chicago, and Amelia Sears, welfare director for Cook County, Illinois, to conduct the study.
The “Survey of Cleveland Agencies Which Are Giving Relief to Families in Their Homes” was released on December 1, 1914. It called for the complete reorganization of the City of Cleveland’s relief department. Issued almost 20 years before the New Deal transferred public responsibility for public welfare from the private sector to the state, this recommendation went unheeded. The survey did serve to establish an ongoing working relationship between the Cleveland Foundation and the city’s social coordinators. This bond tightened after Sherman Kingsley became the first executive secretary of the new Welfare Federation of Cleveland, formed in 1917 from the merger of the Welfare Council and the Federation for Charity and Philanthropy.
Most important, the investigation triggered by Belle Sherwin articulated a core challenge that would define the course of philanthropy here and nationally over the next century. “Poverty is a community responsibility,” averred the survey of Cleveland’s fragmented and embryonic welfare system, continuing, “the whole community must realize the extent of destitution, know its causes and remove them….”