Scholarships provide help to promising students

A few weeks ago, your Community Foundation had its annual Scholarship Celebration at Adams Point Conference Center.

More than 160 people attended, including students receiving scholarships and their parents, donors who have made these scholarships possible, and our board members and other volunteers who served on the committees who reviewed the applications. It’s always a fun event and our donors particularly enjoy having the opportunity to meet the students receiving their scholarship.

This scholarship cycle we had a total of 804 applications and 224 scholarships have been awarded totaling $224,664 to 177 students.

We are very fortunate to have generous donors who understand the value of education and the impact their scholarship can have on deserving students. This year the chairman of our Scholarship Committee was again Kirk Nooks, president of MCC-Longview. His 10 member committee reviewed 236 applications for 12 different scholarship programs. An additional 168 committee members for 71 other scholarships reviewed an additional 568 applications. So all told, we had 178 people in our community engaged in reviewing scholarships this spring. That’s a lot of advocates for education.

We have a number of families in our community who have created scholarships to honor a family member by annually providing a scholarship in that family member’s name.

We feel privileged to support these scholarships and help them honor their family members as they support the education dreams of some of our areas most promising students. One of our most popular scholarships is the Forrest and Marjorie Martin Scholarship which was created from a legacy gift from the Martin’s Estate in 2007.

Their instructions were to create a scholarship fund and they left discretion to our board on the type of scholarship. Entrusted with their generous gift our board researched the unmet needs and learned that there are many one-year-only scholarships for graduating seniors but a dearth of scholarships for students as they continue in college. So the scholarship created by the Martin’s legacy gift is for college students who have completed 36 hours of college credit and it’s a renewable scholarship.

There is also a graduate school scholarship that is also renewable and a one year technical scholarship. This year a total of $42,000 in scholarships were provided to 11 recipients through the generosity of the Martin’s estate bringing the cumulative total of scholarships from their endowed scholarship fund to $396,000.

Providing scholarships is a wonderful way for philanthropic people who understand the value of education to assist some of our areas most promising students and your Community Foundation feels honored and privileged to support this great work.

This story was originally published July 8, 2017 at 12:13 AM with the headline "Scholarships provide help to promising students."