Pennsylvania Society

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Pennsylvania Society is a non-profit, non-political organization founded in 1899 and incorporated in 1903, headquartered in Sellersville, Pennsylvania, which has a membership roster including many leaders of Pennsylvania business, educational, civic, governmental and political organizations.

Its website describes it as "a non-profit, charitable organization with nearly two thousand members around the Commonwealth, the United States, and the world. Its purpose is to honor achievement,to reward excellence, to promote good will and understanding and to celebrate service to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and to humanity in general. Thriving and still growing in its third century of existence, the Society is the longest lived organization of its kind in the country."

The Pennsylvania Society is a networking and information disseminating organization that hosts an annual dinner each December in New York City and hosts an annual tour and luncheon somewhere in Pennsylvania each May.

The annual Pennsylvania Society Dinner in New York City honors distinguished persons who are either current or former residents of Pennsylvania. Recent awardees include broadcaster Chris Matthews, Rockefeller Foundation President Judith Rodin, former Secretary of Homeland Security and Governor of Pennsylvania Tom Ridge, and U.S. Senator Arlen Specter.

The website of the Pennsylvania Society notes that Winston Churchill, then a young journalist, was the first person to address a Pennsylvania Society dinner in 1900.

Receptions are held for attendees at the Pennsylvania Society dinners by Temple University, the University of Pennsylvania, and varying corporations and lobbying organizations. The dinner proceedings themselves are televised by the Pennsylvania Cable Network.

The presence of the dinner and the crowd it attracts of influential leaders--generally over 1,000 people--leads to political fundraisers being held in New York City around the time of the dinner. These fundraisers though are completely separate from the dinner, which maintains the rigid policy of non-partisanship and uninvolvement in politics of the Pennsylvania Society. Society leaders ban any distribution of political literature at the dinner, and there are no announcements or promotions of political events there or at any of the receptions tied to the dinner.

The President of the Pennsylvania Society in 2007 is Arthur J. Rothkopf. The website of the Pennsylvania Society's biography of Mr. Rothkopf says "Now in his first year of a two year term, Mr. Rothkopf is Senior Vice President and Counselor to the President of the United States Chamber of Commerce,with general responsibilities in education and workforce development. From 1993 until 2005,he was President of Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. There, under Mr. Rothkopf's guidance, more than $250 million in new construction was completed and the college's endowment more than doubled. Prior to his tenure at Lafayette, he was appointed Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation by President George H.W. Bush. He serves as a member of the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, as well as a member of the Board of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Mr. Rothkopf graduated from Lafayette College and earned his law degree from Harvard University."

The longtime executive director of the Pennsylvania Society is Carol McCullough Fitzgerald, the 5th Executive Director and the first woman to hold that post. Her husband, James J. Fitzgerald, III, a longtime Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge, was appointed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court by Pennsylvania Governor Edward G. Rendell in 2006.

"Since the turn of the most recent century," Mrs. Fitzgerald writes in the Society's website, "there has been a renewed interest in the Pennsylvania Society and its activities. Today the Society enjoys a reinvigorated status, thanks in part to the introduction of new ideas and a new willingless to evolve and grow in our service to the Commonwealth and to our members.

"Our membership has increased substantially in the past five years, new programs have been instituted and the Pennsylvania Society has been brought alive and well into the 21st Century.

"We are still rooted in our long history; gatherings like the Society's long-standing Holiday Dinner at the Waldorf Astoria will continue to be a premiere event. But newer members' interest in this organization springs from the opportunities we are creating today to improve the Commonwealth we all love and the world we all share."

The Pennsylvania Society has used its dinner proceeds for numerous worthwhile causes. Its website says that a current project is a Benjamin Franklin Scholarship in honor of the 300th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin's birth in 1706.

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