In North Philadelphia’s Hunting Park and East Tioga, poverty pervades every aspect of life.
The neighborhoods’ median income is just $20,611 per year — less than half the $48,554 per year that a single adult without children needs to live comfortably in Philadelphia, according to MIT’s living wage calculator. Forty-four percent of Hunting Park-East Tioga residents live in poverty; 24 percent, in extreme poverty, with an unemployment rate of 14.8 percent — more than the City’s 5.2 percent (and more than 10 points higher than the state’s 3.6 percent). Just 71 percent of students here graduate high school.
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But one Philadelphian, and his expanding circle of Philly-based experts and supporters, believes he (and they) can lead the charge to turn things around. H. Chase Lenfest, scion of the late philanthropist Gerry Lenfest, is both the founder and funder of North10, a nonprofit that is centering community in its efforts to fulfill seemingly entrenched issues of economic development, public safety, and education and recreation for youth.
Can he do it? That’s the goal. Just this year, North10 tackled the summer slide for neighborhood kids, cleaned up 204 vacant lots, and helped residents report illegal dumping. Last June, a North10 student became valedictorian of the Lenfest Campus of Mastery Charter School High School — a first for the program. He’s now at East Stroudsburg University. This is all part of a single-minded blueprint, says Executive Director Joshua Klaris:
“We really pride ourselves on developing deep relationships with both the kids and the adult community members here, and those relationships are coming to fruition. It takes a lot of work and time to support our young people and our community members to make the changes in their lives that they need to make.”
H. Chase Lenfest and North10
Chase Lenfest has been working in Hunting Park-East for nearly two decades. His father, Harold FitzGerald “Gerry” Lenfest, is best known for building cable companies, the last of which he sold in 2000 to Comcast for close to $7 billion. The elder Lenfest then set out to give away much of this wealth, both during and after his death in 2018. (Spend even a little time in Philadelphia, and you’ll see the Lenfest names on buildings and scholarships. He was instrumental in purchasing The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, now part of the nonprofit Lenfest Institute for Journalism.) Lenfest donated more than $1.3 billion in his lifetime.
He also imparted the importance of philanthropy to his children. His daughter Diane Lenfest Myer runs the Allerton Foundation, a Newtown Square nonprofit focused on animal welfare and land conservation. His son Brooke Lenfest founded the Brook J. Lenfest Foundation, which gives to education, job training and mentoring programs.
For his part, the 60-something H. Chase Lenfest has fashioned himself into a multi-industry investor, with dealings in media, marketing, healthcare, technology, real estate, private and public equity — and philanthropy. In 2002, he launched the H. Chase Lenfest Foundation, which, in 2008, opened the Lenfest Center, a 52,000 square-foot community hub with recreational and educational resources, on an abandoned SEPTA repair station at 10th and W. Pike Street. The center provides a number of resources, including after-school programs and the nonprofit SquashSmarts. (Lenfest played squash at Yale; his son plays for Drexel.)
Lenfest saw an opportunity to improve the lives of children in the North Philadelphia neighborhood. He also saw an opportunity to help people in the neighborhood benefit from — rather than be left behind by — increased economic development. He wanted to challenge himself to transform it. His foundation had $39.4 million in assets in 2025, per data from ProPublica.
Lenfest wanted to address what Klaris calls “big, systemic issues” for young families and youth growing up there: affordable housing, dirty streets, workforce development. Such goals, obviously, would require more than one rec center, even one as impressive as his, could provide.
So, in 2017, Lenfest drafted plans for what would become North10. By 2018, he incorporated North10 as a nonprofit, and quickly bought the vacant Liberty Motel and four other properties to turn into affordable housing.
To accomplish his goals, Lenfest also created the grant-making organization H. Chase Lenfest (HCL) Philanthropy, giving North10 the ability to bring in and financially support community groups and nearby nonprofits that had already begun the work North10 wanted to further. North10 would become a “backbone” organization, working one-on-one with grantees to holistically improve the neighborhood.
“To be able to give direct funding to a variety of different organizations that have a whole slew of expertise, provides access to our neighbors that they wouldn’t otherwise have, whether it’s a bookmobile or an improved park,” Klaris says. (They’ve done both.)
HCL Philanthropy began offering grants in the spring of last year and has since supported dozens of organizations working in Hunting Park-East Tioga. The list includes Mary McLeod Bethune Elementary’s Friends of Bethune, which supports the school; Yoga 4 Philly, teaching yoga and meditation; youth athletic mentorship program Timoteo Sports; food, hygiene supply and household goods distributor Small Things, and the community group coalition Broad Germantown Erie Collaborative (BGEC).
Last year, BGEC partnered with Mosaic Development Partners, who were already working nearby through the Rev. Leon H. Sullivan Community Impact Center, a $18 million redevelopment project turning the former annex of Zion Baptist Church into a hub for nonprofits, community arts organizations, food distributors, and community health worker training. With BGEC, they are developing a strategic plan for equitable, local real estate development.
To do this, they analyzed all of the properties in the neighborhood to identify prospective affordable housing sites , the potential for a community land trust, and other ideas to drive equitable neighborhood development while resisting gentrification. So far, the conversations have been open-ended.
“The goal is to give them all of the information, so they can see what’s possible and what additional work needs to be done,” says Mosaic COO Leslie Smallwood-Lewis. “We’re setting the table and giving them information and ammunition to be able to now have these conversations with stakeholders in the area.”
Meet the grantees
HCL Philanthropy offers two grant types: project accelerator and general operating. Project accelerator funding typically ranges from around $25,000 to $250,000 for new initiatives or the expansion of existing, clearly defined projects. General operating support (typically $5,000 to $50,000) goes toward daily expenses and emerging needs.
Funding goes to projects and organizations in three areas: healthy and safe communities, environmental and neighborhood revitalization, and equitable youth growth and empowerment. They gave more than $500,000 to nine organizations during their fall 2025 grant cycle. In spring of 2026, they awarded general operating support grants to addiction recovery support nonprofit The Phoenix Philadelphia, social support and environmental beautification nonprofit Hunting Park Green, the registered community organization Nicetown-Tioga Improvement Team, and the community development corporation Called to Serve.
The Economy League of Greater Philadelphia, the The Merchants Fund, Beyond Literacy,
Tree House Books, and Rock to the Future received project accelerator grants. By funding the first two groups, HCL Philanthropy hopes to start executing some of the work laid out in Mosaic’s plan.
The Merchants Fund is working with North10, Called to Serve, BGEC, neighborhood stakeholders and small businesses to provide grants and business coaching to small-scale neighborhood entrepreneurs. They’ll help support the beloved small businesses neighborhoods rely on through grants for local entrepreneurs.
Meanwhile, the Economy League is working to bring new jobs to Hunting Park and East Tioga. Using the grant funds, they’ll launch the North Philadelphia PAGE project — an offshoot of their successful PAGE program. PAGE, which stands for Philadelphia Anchors for Growth & Equity, works to help local businesses become contractors for large Philadelphia institutions, like Penn or Comcast.
The grant will allow them to build out a version of PAGE that is focused specifically on North Philadelphia. Jeff Hornstein, executive director of the Economy League, says they’re already working with Temple to identify places within their supply chain where they could support local businesses — hopefully creating jobs.
One opportunity he sees? Laundry. Hospitals in the city are often sending their medical laundry out of the city to be cleaned. Hunting Park-East Tioga’s vacant factory and industrial sites could become home to a medical laundry company that would employ local residents and contract with hospitals.
“What we’re trying to do here is look at what assets this neighborhood has: underemployed people and vacant industrial real estate that’s already zoned for a laundry or a commercial kitchen,” Hornstein says. “Then, we can create quality jobs in the neighborhood.”
Sustained, targeted investment
These kinds of targeted economic development projects are important, but HCL Philanthropy also supports organizations doing all kinds of arts and youth enrichment programming, again, trying to support the neighborhood’s needs holistically.
This cycle, they funded Rock to the Future, a nonprofit that offers free music programming for Philadelphia kids and teens from under resourced neighborhoods. Rock’s CEO Jessica Craft says they plan to use the funding to support free music classes, production training and open studio time for young people in the neighborhood.
“[Lenfest’s] strategy is very intentional. You can really see how it’s supporting the community as a whole,” Craft says.
It’s still early days for spring 2026 grantee projects: Phoenix will be opening a recovery and activity center in the neighborhood this fall. But some of the less-recently created programs have reached hundreds of neighborhood folks. North10’s educational program serves 150 K-12 students each year. They provide monthly food assistance to 450 families and have added 41 affordable housing units. They had $18.8 million in assets in 2025, according to reporting from ProPublica.
Nonprofits appreciate how consistent the support from HCL Philanthropy is because it gives them funds they can rely on. Oftentimes, grant or other philanthropic support for a particular project lasts one or two years, and then the funding evaporates. Lenfest’s model allows for sustained investment in a particular community — many leaders say that’s what’s needed to make lasting change.
“It’s rare to see a philanthropist dig in so deep in a particular place,” Hornstein says. “What Chase Lenfest and North10 have been doing in North Philly and Hunting Park-East Tioga is pretty remarkable.”
HCL Philanthropy just wrapped up its fall grant cycle. Applications for the spring cycle will be open from February 15 to April 15 of next year.
Lenfest hopes that his holistic, place-based, sustained investment approach will become a model for other neighborhoods in Philadelphia who are looking to tackle poverty, neighborhood revitalization, and youth empowerment. Since 2022, North10 has worked to transition from a private operating foundation to a public charity, allowing them to diversify their funding sources and setting them up to serve the neighborhood long-term.
Earlier this month, Lenfest led a bus tour through the catchment area as part of the Asset Funder Network Conference. Attendees spoke with some of the HCL Philanthropy grantees and learned more about North10 and its work.
“It’s extremely important to me that we get this information organized in a way that will facilitate others doing similar work,” Lenfest says. “We’re creating a blueprint that can be applied to other parts of the city.”
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