There are positive changes coming to the long-held notions and theories of scholarship funding and programs by Community Foundations. These changes are messy, dynamic, complicated and if done properly will require us to significantly change our policies, procedures and many core ways of doing our business.

Community foundations don’t need more scholarship endowments for graduating high school seniors. We don’t need more scholarship staff or Program Officers to process scholarship transactions for our scholarship programs. In fact we need to completely change our mindset on many aspects of our daily operations; from donor relations, fundraising and fund contracts, to our program teams and finance teams.

For many community foundations around the country, scholarship programs are merely a series of transactions. We accept written, lengthy, formal applications during one brief time early in the year. We send those applications on to our selection committee who then use some interesting or nebulous criteria to determine which graduating seniors we will bless with our money. Then we process checks out to the colleges and universities where our students are attending.  Then early the next year we repeat the process. We very rarely wonder what happened to the class of students we picked the year before, or two years before, or three years before. We don’t question the challenges or success rates of a 1^st generation student from a single parent home, versus the success rates of students from two-parent, college educated homes.

That model of scholarship funding has survived for decades, but thankfully, those transactional days may be coming to an end.  Our community foundation is just one of many now asking ourselves why we’ve allowed such a transactional system to remain in place for so long. We’ve woken up to the realization that “scholarships” are not the goal nor are they truly what our donors wanted. Helping graduating high school seniors with one-time awards also isn’t the goal or intent.

Student success is the goal. Supporting a student throughout their college career is the goal, as long as we keep our eyes on the prize – graduation. Our donors didn’t come to us to award scholarships. Our donors came to us because they wanted us to use financial assets to help students succeed in college. Those two are not at all the same. Success is the only goal.

The new model of doing our work will use post-secondary success endowments or life needs endowments. We will reduce the emphasis on one-time awards for graduating high school seniors and focus more heavily on providing financial support and backing throughout a student’s college career. We will be more open and responsive to using these endowments for students who decide that college is not for them. Perhaps they are better suited for skilled trades or apprenticeship programs. Those are equally important measures of post-secondary success.

Alongside those endowments are funds which provide emergency, gap funding or life needs funding. Those life needs might be anything outside of normal tuition, books, room and board. They might include help with food costs, medical care, mental health counseling, daycare or rental assistance to students living off campus.