William Swanston’s estate will benefit Campbell’s kids

We can imagine that William Swanston would be pleased and proud.

No one knows, of course. Swanston has been dead for nearly 90 years, and making suppositions about a man about which very little is known is a risky business.

But this much is known: Swanston came from humble beginnings, he was industrious, and he had a soft spot for children.

We know this because Swanston came to the United States from Northern Ireland at the age of 10 and struck out on his own at 17. He bought a Canfield farm for $7,000 in the mid-1800s, which was a lot of money then, and paid it off in just 10 years. When he died in 1922, his estate was worth about $100,000 and his will called for the construction of an orphanage on the farm.

“The Swanston Estate” was something that generations of Vindicator Courthouse reporters became acquainted with because that orphanage was never built. As sizable as Swanston’s estate was, it wasn’t enough to build and maintain an orphanage at the time. But over the years, the estate grew, and there were periodic attempts to put the money to new uses, which reporters always found of interest.

But while the estate was growing, society’s view of the need and desirability of orphanages was changing. It wasn’t until last year that trustees of the William Swanston Charitable Fund succeeded in getting a ruling from Probate Court that allowed it to explore 21st century ways of spending a 20th century bequest — while being true to Swanston’s desire to make life better for children.

The fund has grown to more than $7 million, a testament to Swanston’s industry and decades of careful husbanding of the resources he left. While that’s a small fortune, it would be easy enough to squander it. To avoid that, the fund trustees sought requests for proposals, sorted through them, and formulated a plan aimed at helping younger students at risk in the Campbell City School District.

Campbell is a district with a high percentage of students living in poverty, yet its results are impressive. The school district receives an excellent academic rating from the state. Also, the district is small enough, with 1,600 students, to allow a well thought out project to make a real difference in children’s lives — and to allow an empirical evaluation of the results of those efforts.

Collaborative effort

The Swanston Fund reached out to The Community Foundation of the Mahoning Valley and the Raymond John Wean Foundation and the collaborative effort provides a broad range of ideas, expertise and experience.

Working with the school district and with established social service agencies, the project dubbed Campbell Works for Children will include summer programs, counseling, after- school programs and other components aimed at providing children who grow up in difficult circumstances with the kind of support that helps them achieve academic success.

As we said, there’s no way of knowing whether this variation on William Swanston’s theme would meet his approval, but it’s more than a good guess that it would.

He wanted to change the lives of children for the better, and that’s exactly what the new Campbell Works is designed to do — but with a level of sophistication, community involvement and accountability that could not have been envisioned 90 years ago.