Frederic Place was founded in 1978 as a project of the Society of St Vincent de Paul, and that lineage is not incidental. The Society’s approach to charity — personal, practical, and focused on the dignity of the person being helped rather than the convenience of the helper — still shapes how we work today. Its origins go back nearly two centuries, to a group of students in Paris and a challenge one of them could not walk away from.
A challenge to prove it
In 1833, a 19-year-old law student named Frederic Ozanam was part of a student discussion group in Paris debating faith and social questions. Challenged by a critic who argued that Christianity had done nothing practical for the poor in the modern age, Ozanam and a small group of fellow students — among them Auguste Le Taillandier, Paul Lamache, and their mentor Emmanuel Bailly — decided the only real answer was action, not argument.
They began visiting poor families in Paris directly, bringing firewood and food, but more importantly, their time and attention. A Daughter of Charity, Sister Rosalie Rendu, who had spent years working in one of the city’s poorest districts, guided the young students in how to visit with genuine respect rather than charity as spectacle. That distinction — help given person to person, not case to case — became the Society’s defining principle.
Why it carries St Vincent de Paul’s name
The group took their patron from Vincent de Paul, the 17th-century French priest famous for organising practical care for the poor, the sick, and abandoned children long before formal social services existed. Ozanam’s students were not connected to him directly — he had died almost two centuries earlier — but adopted him as a namesake and model for the kind of unglamorous, direct service they wanted to practise.
What started as a handful of students visiting a handful of families grew quickly. Within Ozanam’s lifetime, Conferences of the Society had spread across France and into other countries. Today the Society of St Vincent de Paul operates in more than 150 countries, still organised around small local “Conferences” of volunteers who visit and assist people in their own communities. Ozanam himself was beatified by the Catholic Church in 1997, and is remembered each year on his feast day, the 7th of September.
From Paris to Coronationville
By the time the Society reached South Africa, its members were doing the same work Ozanam started with — visiting, listening, and responding to need directly — applied to local conditions. In Johannesburg, that included recognising a gap in care for elderly and destitute residents with nowhere else to turn. In 1978, that recognition became Frederic Place.
We registered as an independent non-profit organisation in 2012, but the Society’s founding idea — that dignity is not something you extend to people once their other needs are met, but the starting point of how you treat them — remains the standard we hold ourselves to. Read more about our history, or find out how to get involved.
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