WILMINGTON, Del.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov 18, 2025--
The WSFS CARES Foundation, the charitable giving arm of WSFS Financial Corporation (Nasdaq: WSFS), announced it will contribute a $150,000 grant to the Todmorden Foundation to expand affordable housing opportunities in Wilmington, Delaware.
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The Todmorden Foundation is a nonprofit committed to providing access to affordable rental housing and enhancing the quality of life for Wilmington residents. The foundation manages several hundred affordable rental properties and is actively upgrading the residences on the west side of the city known as “The Flats.”
The Flats neighborhood consists of more than 450 housing units originally built between 1903 and 1918 by William P. Bancroft to house Bancroft Mills workers. Due to deteriorating conditions, the Todmorden Foundation, founded by Bancroft, is overseeing a redevelopment project to demolish and rebuild these units.
The WSFS CARES Foundation grant, distributed over three years, will directly support the construction of 30 units expected to open in summer 2027.
“The WSFS CARES Foundation is dedicated to fostering affordable, healthy communities for families to live in,” said Patrick J. Ward, Executive Vice President, Senior Advisor at WSFS Bank and Chairman of the WSFS CARES Foundation. “We have supported this critically important project since the beginning and take pride in staying true to our commitment to the city of Wilmington.”
"We are grateful for supporters like the WSFS CARES Foundation who have backed our efforts since we began in 2015,” said Richard Przywara, President and CEO of the Todmorden Foundation. “Not only will this project help low- and moderate-income individuals and families, but it will also create jobs in construction, maintenance, and property management.”
This is the sixth phase of the project, offering 180 new residences serving approximately 300 individuals. In total, The Flats will be home to over 1,000 residents.
About the WSFS CARES Foundation
The WSFS CARES Foundation brings WSFS’ mission of We Stand for Service ® to life across the communities we serve. The mission of the WSFS CARES Foundation is to support qualified nonprofit service organizations within our regional footprint that are invested in improving communities, fostering a spirit of inclusion and diversity, and whose focus aligns with the WSFS CARES Foundation’s transformational vision. For more information, please visit https://www.wsfsbank.com/about/community/the-wsfs-cares-foundation/.
About WSFS Financial Corporation
WSFS Financial Corporation is a multibillion-dollar financial services company. Its primary subsidiary, WSFS Bank, is the oldest and largest locally headquartered bank and wealth management franchise in the Greater Philadelphia and Delaware region. As of September 30, 2025, WSFS Financial Corporation had $20.8 billion in assets on its balance sheet and $93.4 billion in assets under management and administration. WSFS operates from 114 offices, 88 of which are banking offices, located in Pennsylvania (58), Delaware (38), New Jersey (14), Florida (2), Nevada (1) and Virginia (1) and provides comprehensive financial services including commercial banking, consumer banking, treasury management, and trust and wealth management. Other subsidiaries or divisions include Arrow Land Transfer, Bryn Mawr Trust Advisors, LLC, Bryn Mawr Trust®, The Bryn Mawr Trust Company of Delaware, Cash Connect ®, NewLane Finance ®, WSFS Wealth Management, LLC, WSFS Institutional Services ®, WSFS Mortgage ®, and WSFS Wealth ® Investments. Serving the Greater Delaware Valley since 1832, WSFS Bank is one of the ten oldest banks in the United States continuously operating under the same name. For more information, please visit www.wsfsbank.com.
The Flats in Wilmington, Del. will be home to over 1,000 residents.
When people talk about baking, they often focus on the final product. The tender cookies, the domed muffins, the rich brownies. But the real draw of baking starts long before you roll out the pie crust.
Baking can be many things: an act of creation, connection, control. There’s something comforting about the structure of it: the measuring, the stirring, the transformation of a handful of ingredients into something delicious.
Even if life doesn’t always feel orderly, follow the recipe and things should turn out as planned. It’s like therapy, with a present at the end.
“Baking is how I best connect with the world around me -- making something wonderful and sharing it with others and seeing how much joy they receive from something I made with my own hands,” says chef Joanne Chang, co-owner of Flour Bakery in Boston and an author of baking cookbooks.
"It’s a way to make the world a bit sweeter one cookie, cake, pie at a time.”
When it’s cold outside, there’s something cozy about a warm kitchen and the aroma of something sweet.
But baking can also be catharsis for more volatile feelings: The term “rage baking” was popularized by writer Tangerine Jones, who turned to flour and sugar to channel her anger at the world’s injustices.
Baking can be about maintaining traditions, or possibly curiosity (what is julekake, anyway?).
Hannah Skobe, a doctoral student in astrophysics in Pittsburgh, loves the chemistry aspect of baking — how butter behaves differently at different temperatures, for instance, or why the proteins in egg whites break down when they are over-beaten.
She also finds the process therapeutic, a much-needed break from work.
Ron Ben-Israel, who focuses on elaborate wedding cakes as chef and owner of Ron Ben-Israel Cakes, in New York City, was drawn as a child to “watching as ingredients change through technique” in his mother's kitchen.
"Especially the process of whipping egg whites into meringue fascinated me,” he said.
For him and others, there's an element of nostalgia. A parent’s rugalach recipe, the pie their favorite aunt made every Thanksgiving, the cookies they helped decorate as kids.
Or, it's a way to mark the calendar: a crunchy, buttery crisp in the fall after an apple picking expedition, Irish soda bread on St. Patrick’s Day, a favorite birthday cake that must be made every year.
Alex George of the blog Lily P Crumbs finds something satisfyingly tactile and tangible about baking. Cracking eggs, creaming butter — there’s a lot of sensory pleasure to be had, especially in a screen-centric world. Kneading dough for bread, spreading the icing on cinnamon rolls.
Her readers, she says, “love the process as much as the payoff."
George loves inventing new kinds of baked goods, seeking inspiration whenever she tries a new food: “Savory food is my favorite kind of muse. One incredible French onion soup I had recently inspired my caramelized onion biscuits with French onion soup compound butter.”
Bernard Wong, an avid home baker in New York City, also enjoys delving into new techniques. He has experimented with laminated doughs (think croissants and puff pastry), and has recently played with the East Asian technique — known as tangzhong in China and yudane in Japan — of pouring boiling water over flour to partially cook it, resulting in softer, fluffier breads.
Wong takes pleasure in satisfy a craving for something by making it himself. For instance, he couldn’t find anadama bread, a traditional New England yeast bread, “but I know how to make it.
“It’s economical, I get to control what’s inside of it, and it passes the time when I’m in my apartment and keeps my hands busy,” he said.
He often chooses high-quality ingredients and still saves money compared to buying the finished product. He splurges on expensive chocolate like Callebaut and Valrhona, for instance, and jams as many chips as possible into his cookies.
Even better, confections like these are shareable and can be a way of expressing a sentiment. It might be as simple as “I missed you,” or “I thought you might need something sweet to get through this moment.”
Skobe recently made a banana cake with cream cheese frosting for her co-workers: “I loved seeing all of my friends come to my desk to grab a slice.”
As Chang puts it: “I’m grateful I get to do something that I love so much and that others love so much too."
At its heart, baking feels hopeful. It might be about feeding others, or celebrating, or creating a moment of calm in an otherwise chaotic world, but it’s also about the belief that if you measure the ingredients and follow the steps, something good should come out of it.
Oh, and julekake? It's a Norwegian Christmas cake.
Katie Workman writes regularly about food for The Associated Press. She has written two cookbooks focused on family-friendly cooking, “Dinner Solved!” and “The Mom 100 Cookbook.” She blogs at https://themom100.com/. She can be reached at Katie@themom100.com.
For more AP food stories, go to https://apnews.com/hub/recipes
An Apple Streusel Pie is displayed in New York on Nov. 9, 2018. (Cheyenne M. Cohen via AP)
Brownie batter is poured into a pan in New York on Oct. 7, 2020. (Cheyenne M. Cohen via AP)
A woman applies non-stick spray to a muffin tin in New York on Oct. 23, 2023. (Cheyenne M. Cohen via AP)
This combination of photos shows eggs, left, shortbread dough, center, and a muffin tin being prepped for baking. (Cheyenne M. Cohen via AP)
