Hello, sorry that was a really long Christmas break! Actually, we’ve all gotten really busy with school and jobs and our project was sitting idle for some time, but thanks to Naomi we’re back on track. She spoke to someone at Goshen College about it and they put her in touch with Roger who is the Director of Gift Planning at GC. He is very enthused and has been a wonderful source of information and support. He put Naomi in touch with someone at the Mennonite Foundation and they are interested in helping us. They will meet on Monday and discuss but so far it sounds like they are ideal.
I’ll know more after their meeting on Monday, but I have my fingers crossed. Ideally, our donors can donate directly to the MF and they will put it in a special account for our scholarship fund. We will set up the guidelines and the application process and select the winners and they will send the money directly to their university. If they are able to help us, I couldn’t ask for a better situation.
We would love to offer a support group to the applicants and be there for them if they have any questions. In most scholarship application processes the applicants don’t hear anything unless they’re the winners. We would like to keep in touch with all of our applicants and answer any questions and follow their progress. I’m really excited about forming a community of like-minded Amish descendants who can share information and reach out to new students.
Another exciting aspect of teaming up with the MF is that this could potentially move very quickly. We can start out with an “in and out” fund, which means we raise money that is immediately ready to go to scholarships, perhaps even by this fall. In the future we would like to set up an endowment fund, where we raise a considerable amount of money and only give the interest as scholarships. Of course, it takes a large amount of money to make that happen, but then we wouldn’t have to be fundraising continuously.
I’ll be back after the meeting on Monday with more information. Hopefully it’ll be good news. I’m so grateful to Roger for helping us and putting us in touch with the MF. Having more people on board makes this feel much more possible. I can’t wait to announce our first winners!
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