The Background of the Quaker Inner City School Endowment Fund (QICSEF)

If you�d like to know how QICSEF came into being, read on:� Imogene and Brad Angell were trustees of Friends School in Detroit for a combined 18 years.� During its almost four decades, FSID has constantly teetered on the edge of closure.� Several times, after the board had said the school had to close, the parents rallied, drove around the school honking horns, then settled into bake sales, car washes and a myriad fund-raising activities!� �There�s nothing else like it for our children,� they said.� Miracles began.� The Detroit Free Press�s lead editorial on April 7, 1987, was titled: �Best Friends:� This jewel of a school would be shame to lose.�� In 1989, FSID received a 1.2 million dollar bequest.� A few years later, a foundation made a matching-funds grant.� Little by little, the school moved forward yet always financially unstable.� Thus, when the Angells were retiring, they & Bob Glass, another FSID trustee, looked for a way to help schools like FSID because the sad truth is that few if any inner-city schools have the endowment needed to sustain them.�� QICSEF is the result of the creative thinking of Imogene and Brad Angell and Bob Glass.� The way indeed opened.�

The story of how Friends School in Detroit was founded is just as inspiring.� The following is an extract from an article by Imogene B. Angell in the October 1991 Friends Journal: ��When a suburban independent school refused to admit an African American student because of her race, civic leaders in Detroit were gravely concerned.� (The girl was the daughter of Wade McCree, then judge of a U.S. district court in Michigan and later solicitor general of the United States under President Carter.)� Knowing Quakers have a strong involvement in solid education and a long history of recognizing the worth of each individual regardless of race, the Detroit civic leaders asked the newly formed Green Pastures Quarterly Meeting to found a Quaker school.� A small group of sponsors pooled enough money to get it started.� The school began with 65 students in grades 1 - 5 in a storefront.� Today, FSID has its own building on 4 � acres in downtown Detroit. "