Five years out of Harvard, after several successful interim ministries Hale settled as pastor of the Unitarian church in Worcester, MA. The congregation was close enough to Boston by train for him to keep in touch with his family, and open to their minister being a social advocate, in this case, for the Irish emigrants who arrived in Worcester fleeing from the potato famine.
Edward Hale quickly took up the cause of refugee relief, both the immediate relief of charity, and the further relief of finding opportunities for the refugees to find work and flourish in their new homeland. Hale combined his activism for the Irish with his activism for emancipation by founding the New England Emigrant Aid Society to help fund emigrants willing to move into the new Western states and keep them free states. In Worcester he organized a group that settled in what became Lawrence, Kansas. The support from the Emigrant Aid Society was crucial because the new settlers met with much violence from southerners opposed to a new free state. ...
Edward Hale had long been an activist for emancipation as well as for the education of freed slaves. Unlike many abolitionists and emancipationists, who wanted freedom for blacks but still considered them inferior intellectually, Edward Hale contended that blacks had an “equal capacity for learning as whites.” ...
... Perhaps the most lasting achievement of Hale’s life was the result of a magazine he published for five years called Old and New. Among its first serials was one by Hale, titled Ten Times One is Ten. Based on the life of a dear friend from Hale’s Worcester days, Edward Greenleaf, it tells the story of mourners meeting at the funeral of a friend and each relating how the man had changed their lives. They decide to form a club in his memory with the motto: “Look up and not down. Look forward and not back. Look out and not in. Lend a hand.” ...
... Eventually the clubs came to be known as Lend a Hand Clubs and by 1886, Edward Hale was editing a new monthly journal, Lend A Hand: A Record of Progress, which reported the activities of the clubs and also included articles on social issues of the day, such as Indian Rights. Although the Lend A Hand Clubs are no longer, the Lend A Hand Society in Boston has served as a nonsectarian benevolent organization which each month for over 100 years has lent a hand by giving out small but crucial grants to those facing financial crises, as well as giving out grants for camperships for Boston youth and book grants to institutions throughout the country. Lend A Hand is funded by an endowment and from gifts from the public