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The Oberlin Alumni Fund :: Recognition Societies :: JFO Recognition
The John Frederick Oberlin Society ($1,833 and above)
Oberlin College’s first gift club was founded in 1974 with a charter group of 49 alumni and friends. Today, the Society has more than 500 members who collectively contribute more than $1,000,000 each year in current-use gifts to the College.
John Frederick Oberlin (1740-1826) is best known for his pastorate in Ban de la Roche, then an impoverished mountain parish in northeast France. Oberlin pioneered educational programs, trained teachers, established schools, built roads, introduced the trades of masonry and blacksmithing, taught agricultural reforms, and ministered to his parishioners’ spiritual needs. His commitment to service is the founding ethos of Oberlin College.
The 1833 Alliance ($1,833 – $4,999)
An alliance is “a close association for a common objective,” according to Webster’s New World Dictionary, 2nd College Edition. Since Oberlin College was founded in 1833, we thought this was the perfect name for the Society’s entry-level club.
The President’s Circle ($5,000 – $9,999)
The President’s Circle was established within The John Frederick Oberlin Society in 1984-85 to honor the 13 distinctive and distinguished presidents who have both served and led Oberlin.
The John Mercer Langston Circle ($10,000 – $24,999)
John Mercer Langston (1829-1897) was a man of many firsts: first dean of law at Howard University; first African American admitted to the Ohio bar; first African American elected from the State of Virginia to the U.S. House of Representatives. In his many careers, Langston also served as minister resident and consul general to Haiti and as charge d’affairs to Santo Domingo. A member of the Class of 1849, Langston, an emancipated slave, was an ancestor of the poet Langston Hughes.
The Henry Churchill King Circle ($25,000 – $49,999)
As president of Oberlin College from 1902 to 1927, Henry Churchill King (1858-1934) said, “I do not intend to become a beggar for Oberlin, but propose to make it so good and worthy a school that people would deem it a privilege to give to it.” In his 1956 book Henry Churchill King of Oberlin, Donald M. Love wrote, “King’s accomplishment for Oberlin was that of the conservative who holds fast to what is good in the past and that of the progressive who presses on to the high calling of the future.”
The Shipherd and Stewart Society ($50,000 and above)
John J. Shipherd (1802-1844) and Philo P. Stewart (1798-1868) met as teenagers while students at Pawlet Academy in Pittsford, Vermont. Later, while serving at a Sunday school post in Middlebury, Vermont, Shipherd conceived the idea of establishing a school and colony. It has been said that his powerful “positive force” and great faith enabled him to persuade men of wealth to support the founding of Oberlin College.
Stewart was known as a frugal, careful man. A missionary to the Choctaw Indians in Mississippi during the 1820s, he later joined Shipherd in Elyria, Ohio, where the two planned the founding of Oberlin’s college and colony. Put in charge of the boarding service for the new college, Stewart fell into disfavor with the students for his commitment to a “plain diet” and eventually returned to the East.
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