WARREN, Ohio – Concepts such as racial equity and inclusion weren’t explicitly part of The Raymond John Wean Foundation’s focus when it was established in 1949.
Today, those ideas are the bedrock of its work, according to Jennifer Roller, president for the past decade.
Nor is that the only difference in the foundation and how it operates today.
The foundation was very different when it was started, reflects Gordon Wean, chairman of the board that governs the entity established by his grandfather.
Raymond John Wean Sr. started Wean Industries in 1929. The company eventually became Wean United, “one of the most successful steel-part manufacturing companies in our region,” according to Meghan Reed, executive director of the Trumbull County Historical Society.
“My grandfather had been very successful in the cold rolled steel equipment field, and he wanted to establish a vehicle through which the family could make charitable donations,” says Gordon Wean, who has been board chairman since 2006.
Originally, the Wean Foundation was what Wean describes as “a typical family foundation” that made donations to organizations that members of the family were interested in. For example, his grandmother had “an absurd number of volunteer hours” as an American Red Cross nurse at what was then Trumbull Memorial Hospital. “So that was something that they always supported.”
The Warren-based foundation has been headquartered since 2012 in the Market Block Building on Courthouse Square. With an endowment of approximately $89 million, it distributed nearly $3.4 million in grants in 2023 and $13.2 million in the five-year period that ended last year.
The shift to becoming a more focused foundation came around the time that the third generation of the family became involved with the organization, Wean recalls. The tax benefits enjoyed by someone who creates a foundation are accompanied by “a responsibility and obligation to do more than just give money away to things you like,” he says.
There also was a need to establish what the organization wanted to accomplish. The Mahoning Valley had experienced “incredible divestment” over the years and there was a desire to focus on being “more of a member of the community” than simply a source of funding.
“That was sort of how it was brewing,” Wean says. “By the time my father died in 2006, we had reached that decision, and the board was certainly behind it.”
The following year, the foundation hired its first executive director, Joel Ratner. His first hire was Roller, who in October will have been with the organization for 18 years.
Since shortly before she came on board, the foundation’s priorities have been community revitalization, educational opportunity, economic opportunity and public and civic sector leadership – “really big buckets” that are interconnected, Roller says.
“Those are the areas when you’re thinking about a family or a community being able to thrive, they really do come together: Where do you live, or have access to go to school? What’s the opportunity in terms of employment so that you can take care of your home and take care of your community?” she continues.
“All these things sort of come together like that,” Wean adds. “So, what if you don’t get a good education? What if you don’t have a stable home life? What if you don’t have a job to go to. The Valley always had jobs. This is history now, but the Valley always had jobs that someone without an education could do.”
Area residents represent a key asset of both the foundation and the community, Roller says. The Wean board of directors includes community members, and the foundation is in the process of rebuilding its resident council, which helps to inform resident engagement efforts.
“We’re not experts and sometimes the folks who are at the decision-making tables aren’t either,” she says. “It’s really important for us to bring in the folks who are closest to the challenges to help inform what some of these directions are, what some of these solutions, might be.”
NEED TRANSITION
Area organizations that can trace their roots to the Wean Foundation’s new focus are Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corp., which it partnered with the city of Youngstown to create in 2009, and Trumbull Neighborhood Partnership, which launched the following year.
Creation of the two neighborhood improvement entities – which Wean considers to be strategic partners to the foundation – came out of work by the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative, which the foundation also established. Residents in both Youngstown and Warren said their communities needed organizations to help achieve their goals.
“YNDC would not exist in its current form without the Wean Foundation’s support,” Ian Beniston, YNDC executive director, says.
The foundation helped convene the initial steering committee that led to YNDC’s creation and has been “one of our most critical partners,” enabling its development and growth, Beniston says. Its financial support over the years has allowed YNDC to expand and have a flexible funding source that enabled its capacity to grow gradually over time. In recent years, YNDC has gone beyond its role in residential repair and development and taken on commercial properties.
“That’s been an absurd success,” Wean says. “You never expect your wildest dreams to come true.”
As for Trumbull Neighborhood Partnership, “There’s really no description of how TNP came to be without the story of the hand Wean had in it,” Matt Martin, TNP executive director, says.
The Wean Foundation is not just a baseline funder of TNP for the past 15 years, providing “significant” financial resources, but has funded the organization in a way that allows it to leverage that money to pursue other grants, contracts and resources, Martin says. In addition, the foundation engages TNP through the year as a partner.
YNDC’s relationship with the Wean Foundation “is atypical of a grantor-grantee relationship. It truly is a strategic partnership,” Beniston affirms. “I would say we serve as trusted advisers of one another.”
The foundation also partners with grassroots organizations, including through its grant-making program, as well as with other philanthropic groups, such as the Youngstown Foundation and Community Foundation of the Mahoning Valley.
“With our emphasis on race, equity and inclusion, we’ve been forging ahead and building rapport and partnerships with Black- and Hispanic-led organizations,” such as Inspiring Minds Warren and United Returning Citizens, Roller says.
The foundation’s five-year strategic direction, adopted in 2019, “made racial equity and inclusion its North Star,” according to a foundation document.
The decision to incorporate race equity and inclusion into foundation initiatives wasn’t spurred by a specific event, she says.
Early discussions of issues such as housing destabilization didn’t explicitly involve race or diversity, but further examination found that it was taking place in predominantly Black and Hispanic communities.
Similarly, student testing numbers typically identified Black and Hispanic students predominantly among those falling behind.
“[Race] bubbled up because when we were doing root cause analyses, who are we really talking about?” she says. “If you’re going to try to have some impact, let’s be transparent.”
Now race equity – where one’s race has no influence on how one fares in society – and inclusion – making sure people feel welcomed and valued to participate – are part of “the foundation of the work” Wean is doing.
“From the grant-making to the capacity building to the convening or partnerships and operations, that’s just the underlying current of how we do and measure our work,” Roller says.
Changes in how the organization operates even encompass how it marked its 75th anniversary, which it did Sept. 10 with a summit focusing on equitable compensation.
“We’ve never had a gala or even a big community cookout at Wean Park or something like that. Why don’t we do something that is also meaningful in a way and celebratory?” Roller says.
Even around the time of the organization’s 50th anniversary, it was “not as out there in the community,” Wean points out.
“The foundation was a very different foundation,” he reflects. “This wouldn’t be something we would have thought of. But since we are partnering with the community on a number of things, it’s important that we be visible and celebrate things.”
The event’s keynote speaker was Ruha Benjamin, an author and the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American studies at Princeton University.
Among the topics she addressed was viral justice, the subject of one of her books, which “orients us differently toward small-scale, often localized, actions,” Benjamin said. “It invites us to witness how an idea or an action that sprouts in one place can be adopted, adapted and diffused elsewhere.”
The foundation now is in its next five-year plan, which concludes in 2028. There were several areas where the foundation was able to advance its work, including funding more members of the Black, Hispanic and Latino communities and providing support for the sustainability of those organizations. But there were items the organization “just hadn’t gotten to yet,” Roller says.
“We will stay the course in terms of our grant making and capacity building. But if there were any area that would be a major emphasis over the next five years, it would be the building up again of how we work in partnership in community, and that’s a big undertaking,” she continues.
“We have to be flexible, nimble. Private foundations are, by definition, flexible and nimble, but we also know that we’re not going to solve everything that we set out to solve, even with great groups like TNP and YNDC,” Wean adds. “There are always barriers to people’s, families’ and residents’ success.”
Pictured at top: Jennifer Roller and Gordon Wean oversee the foundation’s $89 million endowment. Last year it awarded $3.4 million in grants.