At the present time, the Coleman Foundation accepts grant proposals by invitation only. Since we are in the beginning stages of development, the Foundation will concentrate initially on generating its own programs while conducting research to identify potential future projects that are aligned with the Foundation’s mission. Unsolicited grant requests will not be accepted at this time.

A few of the projects in which we have been involved:

• Helped fund a participant in HERO’s (Human Efforts Reaching Out) mission to Honduras.
• Helped fund an undergraduate student work trip volunteering in the village of El Obraje, Nicaragua, 
• Sponsored a participant in HERO’s (Human Efforts Reaching Out) mission to Nicaragua, 
• Matching grant for undergraduate service project supporting an orphanage in Luxi, China,
• Scholarship support for the Harold and Alyce Ann Hall International Student Scholarship, University of Mount Union.
• Scholarship support for the Medical Interpreter Training Program administered by Asian Services in Action, Inc.
• Project support for research on local human trafficking by a member of the Northeast Ohio Girls Scouts of the United States of America.
• Support for the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) program of Northeast Ohio Girls Scouts of the United States of America.
• Undergraduate tuition support for Asian immigrants.

The Thomas Henry Tibbles Fellowships Project

In 2019, the Foundation created an award for outstanding alumni, current students, and faculty of the University of Mount Union engaged in border crossing. The award is called the Thomas Henry Tibbles Fellowship and is named in honor of a former Mount Union student.

A number of years ago when researching the early days of Mount Union for a convocation presentation, I came across the name of Thomas Henry Tibbles (b.1840). He appears in Yost Osborne’s A Select School: the History of Mount Union College. In a few short sentences, Osborne introduced Tibbles as a Mount Union student (1858-1861) who had been active in the anti-slavery movement since the age of 16. Tibbles was associated with the abolitionist John Brown who, you will recall, raided a U.S. military arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in October 1859 to steal weapons to arm slaves for a rebellion. Brown was caught, brought to trial, accused of treason, and hung.

Although Tibbles did not accompany Brown on that ill-fated raid, he did associate with Brown and also rode with another famous abolitionist known as James Henry Lane during several anti-slavery skirmishes in Kansas in the year 1858 – just months before he enrolled at Mount Union.

Upon further research, I discovered that Tibbles led a rather active life as not only an abolitionist, but later as an activist journalist and a crusader for the fair treatment of American Indians. From the Smithsonian Online Archives:

            Thomas Henry Tibbles was born May 22, 1840, near Athens, Ohio to parents William and Martha (nee Cooley) Tibbles. In 1856, at the age of 16, Tibbles fought with anti-slavery Free-Staters in the Bleeding Kansas conflicts under James Henry Lane. Lane’s troops disbanded the same year and Tibbleswent on to study at Mt. Union College in Alliance, Ohio from 1858-1861. During the Civil War Tibblesserved as a scout and newspaper correspondent in Missouri and Kansas and continued newspaper work until 1871 when he became a circuit preacher. Between 1874 and 1879, Tibbles worked on the staffs of various newspapers in Omaha, Nebraska eventually reaching the post of assistant editor of the Omaha Daily Herald. It was during his time at the Herald that Tibbles was instrumental in bringing the case of Standing Bear and the Ponca Indian people before the United States District Court at Fort Omaha. Standing Bear, along with thirty other Poncas, had returned to their home in Nebraska after being forcibly removed to Indian Territory 1878. They were being detained at the Omaha Reservation on an order from the Secretary of the Interior and Tibbles began to circulate the story of the plight of the Ponca ‘to major newspapers gathering the support of the public. Eventually Tibbles had attorneys John L. Webster and A.J. Poppleton help Standing Bear petition the court with a writ of habeas corpus. On April 30, 1879 Judge Elmer Dundy declared that an Indian is a person within the law and that the Ponca were being held illegally, setting Standing Bear and the Ponca free. Following the trial, Tibblescontinued to report on violations against Native American rights. Tibbles was a witness to the aftermath of the massacre of Native Americans at Wounded Knee in 1891, and reported this tragedy to the world. From 1893-1895, he worked as a newspaper correspondent in Washington D.C. On returning to Nebraska, Tibbles became editor-in-chief of The Independent, a weekly Populist Party newspaper. He was the Populist Party nominee for Vice President of the United States in 1904. Though unsuccessful in this campaign Tibbles continued to write on Populist issues as well as editing The Investigator from 1905-1910 and returning to the Omaha World Herald from 1910 to his retirement.

http://sova.si.edu/record/NMAI.AC.066, Smithsonian Online Virtual Archives

The above mentions an important newspaper story Tibbles filed in which the world first learned of the unspeakable tragedy that had occurred at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation, SD, on December 29,1890 — where Chief Big Foot and anywhere from 150-300 plus Lakota Sioux were massacred by the U.S. military. His 1891 article titled “All Murdered in a Mass” appeared in the Omaha World-Herald and read in part:

Nothing I have seen in my whole… life ever affected or depressed or haunted me like the scenes I saw that night in that church. One un-wounded old woman… held a baby on her lap… I handed a cup of water to the old woman, telling her to give it to the child, who grabbed it as if parched with thirst. As she swallowed it hurriedly, I saw it gush right out again, a bloodstained stream, through a hole in her neck.” Heartsick, I went to… find the surgeon… For a moment he stood there near the door, looking over the mass of suffering and dying women and children… The silence they kept was so complete that it was oppressive… Then to my amazement I saw that the surgeon, who I knew had served in the Civil War, attending the wounded… from the Wilderness to Appomattox, began to grow pale… ‘This is the first time I’ve seen a lot of women and children shot to pieces,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand it’…. Out at Wounded Knee, because a storm set in, followed by a blizzard, the bodies of the slain Indians lay untouched for three days, frozen stiff from where they had fallen. Finally they were buried in a large trench dug on the battlefield itself. On that third day Colonel Colby… saw the blanket of a corpse move… Under the blanket, snuggled up to its dead mother, he found a suckling baby girl.

Digital History Project

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=3&psid=1101