Oaklawn Foundation awards historical society $ 10K grant
The Oaklawn Foundation has awarded the Garland County Historical Society a $ 10,000 grant to help fund its digitization project.
“We are so grateful to the Oaklawn Foundation for this generous gift,” said Elizabeth Robbins, the historical society’s executive director.
“It will help educate generations of students and citizens by preserving and making more readily available these treasures we hold in trust for our community. This gift is an example of the foundation’s commitment to the education and welfare of the people of Garland County,” Robbins said in a news
release.
The Oaklawn Foundation’s gift is the second significant grant the project has received this year. Umetco Minerals Corp. announced in January that it was pledging up to $ 15,000 this year to help digitize the irreplaceable photographs, in addition to $ 2,500 a year for the next five years to match community gifts to the project.
The project will preserve more than 30,000 photographs, negatives, and slides as digital images that can be stored safely off- site, Robbins said.
The digitizing project gained urgency after August 2012, when a microburst hit downtown Hot Springs and caused a tree to crash into the historical society’s building at 328 Quapaw Ave.
Robbins said the funding will ensure the images’ survival in case a disaster ever strikes the society’s archives building, and will also make the images more accessible to researchers and the public, since they will be inserted into the society’s searchable computer database.
“The heart of the Oaklawn Scholarship Program is to promote efforts in our community that show great educational promise for all ages. The Garland County Historical Society is creating a digital history of Garland County that will be available to people across the world,” Kerry Lockwood Owen, chairman of the Oaklawn Foundation Scholarship Committee, said in the release.
The Oaklawn Foundation was initially proposed by Oaklawn Park as part of a comprehensive Community Benefits Plan that would be derived from passage of expanded electronic gambling.
Hot Springs voters approved the gambling expansion in 2005, but the Oaklawn Foundation’s work was placed on hold until the vote’s outcome was affirmed by the Arkansas Supreme Court in September 2007.
Charles J. Cella, the track’s president, and his family presented the Oaklawn Foundation with $ 1 million in September 2006, the single- largest gift ever made to a Hot Springs charity.
The $ 1 million was split 50- 50, with half going to scholarships for students in Garland County, and the other half going to establish a health education clinic for seniors.
The foundation is also supported by a percentage of the money generated from games of skill at Oaklawn.
“The foundation has given hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarships to local college students, as well as funds to the county’s school districts in its Wellness Program,” the release said.
The Oaklawn Foundation also created the Oaklawn Center on Aging, which provides services to seniors at the Hot Springs Senior Center on Woodbine, and the McAuley Senior Center in Hot Springs Village.
The Garland County Historical Society is a nonprofit organization founded in 1960.