Youth-led Philanthropy Program Awards $50,000 in Grants to Non-profit Youth Initiatives

October 10, 2025/Globe Times Staff

The Philadelphia Foundation, a publicly supported community foundation that has served Philadelphia and its surrounding counties for over a century, is continuing its legacy of supporting community needs with the return of YOUTHadelphia.

YOUTHadelphia is a youth-in-philanthropy program where public high school students identify potential non-profit recipients of funding, put them through a rigorous application process, and ultimately end up deciding where the money goes. “They do site visits and sometimes they put [these organizations] through the ringer even more than we do,” Phil Fitzgerald of the Philadelphia Foundation said. The Foundation sets aside these funds every year to invest in youth programs across the city, but instead of making those decisions on their own, they let young people make those decisions for themselves – since they are the real beneficiaries of these programs.

This year’s cohort brought together 12 Philadelphia public high school students ages 14-18 from Academy at Palumbo, Olney High School, Sayre High School, and West Philadelphia High School, and was managed by PhillyBOLT.

“This program is important because it allows you to help other nonprofit organizations,” said Jaiden Thompson, a student from West Philadelphia High School. “It also helps you learn that you have to make important decisions in life. It showed me how much of an impact I could make at a young age while also helping me learn about the decisions I want to make in the future.”

The recipients of the $50,000 in grants include ACHIEVEability, As I Plant This Seed, Imani Star Development, Ordinarie Heroes, and The Mastermind Cooperative. Each of these organizations runs programs which the twelve students in the cohort believe are addressing the needs of the city’s youth, and the funds will go directly to those programs.

“When we trust young people with real power and responsibility, they don’t just meet our expectations, they redefine what’s possible – bringing us closer to a future where every neighborhood is thriving, led by the people living there,” said Hillary Do, executive director of PhillyBOLT.

In 2004, YOUTHadelphia was born as a result of a deal made between the City of Philadelphia and the local sports teams the Phillies and the Eagles. This deal included The Philadelphia Foundation receiving funding to launch the city’s first youth-in-philanthropy program, and more than 20 years later, YOUTHadelphia has invested more than $1 million in youth-led programs. The collaboration with PhillyBOLT has allowed the program to expand its reach to uplift the voices and choices of ALL young people and not just those from well-resourced schools.