Deadline to apply is March 8
B1 ation for the Education of Children Youth Scholarship Fund awarded five $1,000 scholarships for the last academic year, and the SchoolHouse Connection awards $2,000 scholarships.
And at UC San Diego, its Hope Scholars holistic student support program, previously known as Guardian Scholars, supports homeless students and former and current foster youth.
The program provides scholarships, year-round on-campus housing, counseling, tutoring, employment opportunities and more and has a 75 percent six-year graduation rate for fulltime, first-year students and a 70 percent four-year graduation rate for transfers.
“Everybody wants to see something change; everybody really wants to find a solution,” Weck said. But the programs already available haven’t been enough. “We’re still seeing this problem impacting our communities.”
A number of San Diegans seem to agree. The Donorbox campaign to raise the capital to establish the scholarship raised more than $25,000 in two weeks — a goal the scholarship’s advisory council thought would take months.
The scholarship was finalized last week with the San Diego Foundation. Weck says her goal is to raise another $25,000 to award the first 10 scholarships worth $2,500 each next spring.
The new scholarship will be part of the San Diego Foundation’s Community Scholarship program, which has awarded more than $46 million to more than 12,000 local college students since 1997, most of them low- to middle-income.
Last month, the foundation opened its Common Scholarship Application, which lets students use one application to apply to nearly 150 scholarships totaling $3.5 million, with awards ranging from $1,000 to more than $5,000.
The deadline to apply for the upcoming academic year is 2 p.m. March 8.
“When we support historically under-resourced college students, we’re fostering equity of opportunity in San Diego and supporting the local talent pipeline that builds our region’s workforce,” said Danielle Valenciano, director of the foundation’s program.