Lawyer Bernard Smalley, who learned about power in his dad’s barbershop, to head politically connected charity that runs Girard College

Rising stock and real estate markets have lifted the Board of City Trusts, the obscure agency with more than a half-billion dollars in investments and a mission of overseeing institutions and activities ranging from Girard College to one of the nation’s premiere eye hospitals.

Now with the death of its long-term chairman, it has a new board leader who says he has some modest but firm ideas about modernizing its operation and boosting its image. The payoff, he says, will be a fresh round of benefactors.

”As the Board of City Trusts becomes more public,” Bernard W. Smalley Sr., the new chair, told me. “I think it’s a matter of time until more people who want to leave money in their wills will fit us into that mix.”

Smalley, 70, long a volunteer board member at the trust, stepped up to the unpaid top post after the chairman since 2012, Ronald Donatucci, the Philadelphia register of wills for 40 years and a Democratic Party power, died on Election Day in November.

He will help direct the trust’s $629 million in stocks, bonds and other securities — up a third from $468 million in just five years — as well as help manage its massive real estate holdings, worth hundreds of millions more. Notably, the trust also oversees Wills Eye Hospital at Eighth and Walnut Streets, affiliated with Jefferson Health.

Though it controls 120 individual trusts, more than half its assets are committed to Girard College, the walled, 42-acre free boarding school a few blocks north of Center City in gentrifying North Philadelphia. The school’s enrollment, which approached 1,000 at its modern peak, was cut to about 300 a decade ago and has remained at that level. Students live on campus during school days, but go home for weekends.

Smalley says he expects to be able to boost enrollment, though not necessarily to reopen weekend dorms. He also hopes to see the college partner with other institutions that could use parts of the campus and provide programs beyond its walls.

Girard officials have long lamented that founder Stephen Girard, the trader-banker-investor who died in 1831, had invested heavily in Pennsylvania coal fields, pouring money into a once-lucrative fuel that paid for the campus but has since lost its luster.

A luckier bet might have been in chocolate — the focus of a later Pennsylvania millionaire, Milton Hershey, who patterned the Hershey School on Girard College. His endowment is now worth $17.4 billion, which is more than Penn’s ($15 billion).

Though the school remains tied to its expensive-to-maintain campus, Smalley says college president Heather Deneen Wathington, in her third year, has improved student life by firming up partnerships with Curtis Institute of Music and other institutions and by increased mentoring.

With adjacent North Philadelphia’s undergoing a real estate boom and institutional space diminishing in Philadelphia, he says, “This is an institution folks are looking to partner with. The key is to find the right partner.”

Under Wathington, the school has convinced employees at Comcast and other companies to donate through a state program to encourage giving to private schools in return for a tax credit. Such contributions topped $1 million last year.

In a troubling piece of Philadelphia history, Girard, a slave owner, limited college admission in his will to “white, male” orphans, restrictions that were lifted as a result of lawsuits and vigorous civil-rights protests starting in the 1950s. Even so, the college didn’t admit its first Black student until 1968.

Some critics say Girard should be closed and its money used to fund students at the private schools of their choice. Such a move was approved by trustees of the Charles Ellis Trust for Girls, once Girard’s sister school, nearly 50 years ago.

Smalley, who’s also on the board of the Ellis program (not part of the Board of City Trusts), remains a booster of the boarding-school concept.

As for other parts of the Trust’s empire, he notes that Wills Eye — with its research labs and the emergency services it provides for neighboring Jefferson hospital — is rated second only to Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Miami, among U.S. vision hospitals by U.S. News & World Report.

“We’re a breath away from being rated number one. Under Julia Haller’s leadership, it’s going to happen,” he says. Haller is ophthalmologist-in-chief at Wills and chair of Jefferson’s eye department.

Smalley traces the roots of his career to his childhood in the 1960s, when he was a kid helping at his dad’s barbershop at 43rd and Lancaster in West Philly, “shining shoes and carrying coats and selling water ice.”

He spent his time listening, watching and learning from the men who frequented the shop. They came from all walks of life, from stevedores to city workers, from business owners to judges.

“My father cut their hair every week, and he was their counselor,” Smalley says. ”It was a place an African American man could feel free to talk about the issues he faced all that week, in life and at home.”

H. Patrick Swygert, later dean at Temple Law and president of Howard University; Ron Davenport, who would become dean at Duquesne Law; and future federal appeals Judge William H. Hastie Jr. were among his father’s customers.

It’s no great surprise then that after finishing Temple’s journalism program, Smalley turned down a job offer from the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Instead, he chose to work in the Philadelphia courts, rising to become deputy court administrator. He graduated from Delaware Law School in 1980 and has worked as a trial lawyer ever since. He is with the Philadelphia firm of Raynes McCarty, representing people hurt on the job or in hospital mistakes.

With its unusual oversight structure — its unpaid board is dominated by elected pols and other insiders — the Girard empire has long drawn criticism, with skeptics wondering whether there were less politicized ways to spend on behalf of the city’s poor.

I asked Smalley whether he would rationalize the board’s idiosyncratic investment program, which includes payments to private money managers, a portfolio of legacy real estate from the 1800s, and seemingly ad hoc loans to favored Philadelphia developers.

Smalley pledged to increase transparency of the board’s investments and its decisions. He invited me to review the books. He hopes to increase the modest flow of new investments that citizens entrust to the board, a harder pitch now that donors have many private-sector choices for legacy management. “We are carefully moving forward,” he says.