The Walt Disney Company recently announced a $1 million commitment to the United Negro College Fund (UNCF).
The UNCF, one of the leading minority scholarship organizations, will use the money to provide scholarships to outstanding African American students in underserved communities across the country, while expanding educational and career resources for them. The UNCF traditionally serves low-income youth who are the first in their families to go to college, with more than 50 percent coming from families whose incomes are less than $30,000 per year.
The Walt Disney Company UNCF Corporate Scholars will be selected based on a competitive application process administered by UNCF. To be considered, applicants must be enrolled full-time at a four-year college or university, demonstrate financial need, have a minimum cumulative 2.5 GPA on a 4.0 scale, and have an interest in pursuing a career in the entertainment industry.
The application process opens March 16 and closes May 15. Preference will be given to students attending a Historically Black College or University (HBCU) to ensure 50% of each group are derived from these schools.
“UNCF works to ensure our future leaders have the opportunity to obtain the college degrees they need, and our nation needs them to have,” UNCF president and CEO Michael L. Lomax said. “The Walt Disney Company UNCF Corporate Scholars Program expands their academic training into practical experiences, to create a diverse pipeline of college educated professionals poised to assume fulfilling careers in the entertainment industry. The investment we are making in better futures for them now will pay dividends in years to come when they become our next generation of leaders.” article by Joe Otterson via thewrap.com
Angella and Dan Henry. Angella Henry said she works day and night to keep the memory of her son alive through the DJ Henry Dream Fund (Credit: Phillip Martin / WGBH)
It’s been four years since a college student from Easton was shot to death by a New York police officer. Since then, Trayvon Martin was killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer and Michael Brown was killed by a policeman. The controversial killings of these young black men have sparked community outrage and scrutiny of the behavior of law enforcement. For the family of Danroy “DJ” Henry Jr., they still wait for the legal process to play out — but they’re also finding ways to remember their son.
This Wednesday would have been DJ Henry’s 25th birthday. The Boston NAACP says that day they will send a letter to the organization’s national members asking them to press the Justice Department for a full and complete investigation into the Henry shooting.
For all the heartache, for all the lingering questions, this was a night to celebrate DJ Henry’s life, shaped by a love of sports.
“We just ask that you think about tonight, not as giving us money, but as helping children who would love to say yes say yes,” said DJ’s father, Dan Henry. “These young children, their biggest need is to remain children.”
Dan Henry told an audience of 400 at the fourth annual DJ Henry Dream Fund that he could not think of a better way to remember his son than by helping others succeed.
One of those helped is Quincy Omari Picket.
“My mom heard about it and she went and signed up, and I got a scholarship,” said the 10-year old from Brockton. “I was happy. I was surprised. I lost 30 pounds. I lost all that weight. I tried on my suit and didn’t have to buy a new one.”
As DJ’s life was remembered at the annual fundraiser, his death is still hard to reconcile. Henry played football for Pace University in New York. After a homecoming game on Oct. 16, 2010, he and several friends went to a bar to celebrate. DJ was the designated driver. So when the bar closed, he went to get the car.
Idling in a fire lane, he was told by a cop to move on, according to witnesses. He did. What happened next is as unsettling today as it was four years ago.
Shawon Jackson went to Princeton University via the Questbridge program and is president of the student government there. (Michael Kirby Smith, NEW YORK TIMES)
Arianna Trickey was opening a piece of mail in her bedroom during junior year of high school when a pamphlet fell out of the envelope. The pamphlet seemed to offer the impossible: the prospect of a full scholarship to several of her dream colleges.
She went running out to her father, a house painter, who was sitting on the family’s porch in Grass Valley, a California city in the Sierra Nevada foothills. “You have to see this,” she told him. “This is the scholarship that will get me to the best schools in the country.”
The pamphlet was from a nonprofit organization called QuestBridge, which has quietly become one of the biggest players in elite-college admissions. Almost 300 undergraduates at Stanford this year, or 4 percent of the student body, came through QuestBridge. The share at Amherst is 11 percent, and it’s 9 percent at Pomona. At Yale, the admissions office has changed its application to make it more like QuestBridge’s.
Founded by a married couple in Northern California — she an entrepreneur, he a doctor-turned-medical-investor — QuestBridge has figured out how to convince thousands of high-achieving, low-income students that they really can attend a top college. “It’s like a national admissions office,” said Catharine Bond Hill, the president of Vassar.
The growth of QuestBridge has broader lessons for higher education — and for closing the yawning achievement gap between rich and poor teenagers. That gap is one of the biggest reasons that moving up the economic ladder is so hard in the United States today. But QuestBridge’s efforts are innovative enough to deserve their own attention.
In addition to the hundreds of its students on college campuses today, hundreds more have graduated over the last decade. They’ve gone on to become professors, teachers, business people, doctors and many other things. Ms. Trickey, a senior at the University of Virginia who is also getting a master’s in education, plans to become an elementary-school teacher in a low-income area.
College admissions officers attribute the organization’s success to the simplicity of its approach to students. It avoids mind-numbingly complex talk of financial-aid forms and formulas that scare away so many low-income families (and frustrate so many middle-income families, like my own when I was applying to college). QuestBridge instead gives students a simple message: If you get in, you can go.
Yet the broader lessons of QuestBridge aren’t only about how to communicate with students. They’re also how our society spends the limited resource that is financial aid.
The group’s founders, Michael and Ana Rowena McCullough, are now turning their attention to the estimated $3 billion in outside scholarships, from local Rotary Clubs, corporations and other groups, that are awarded every year to high school seniors. The McCulloughs see this money as a wasted opportunity, saying it comes too late to affect whether and where students go to college. It doesn’t help the many high-achieving, low-income strivers who don’t apply to top colleges — and often don’t graduate from any college.
“Any private scholarship given at the end of senior year is intrinsically disconnected from the college application process,” Dr. McCullough said, “and it doesn’t have to be.”
They plan to offer prizes in some cases to high school juniors, like a summer program or a free laptop, to persuade them to apply. To win the prize, the junior would need to fill out a detailed application, which could become the basis for his or her college application. The idea draws on social science research, which has shown that people often respond better to tangible, short-term incentives (a free laptop) than to complicated, longer-term ones (a college degree, which will improve your life and which you can afford). Two pilot programs started with donors — one focused on New Yorkers, one on low-income Jewish students — have had encouraging results, the McCulloughs say.
QuestBridge has its roots in summer programs they started as Stanford students in the 1980s and 1990s. The initial one helped Dr. McCullough, who had paid his own way through Stanford, win a Rhodes scholarship.
Terranisha Hiley is a senior at Columbia University. (Ruth Fremson, NEW YORK TIMES)
The programs tried to lift the ambitions of talented teenagers from modest backgrounds, by introducing them to peers and to successful adults. “The combination of seeing what can be done and then having someone you respect telling you you can do it — I think that’s what most young people need,” said Nico Slate, who attended a program in 1996. A native of a small town in the Mojave Desert, he is now a history professor at Carnegie Mellon and studies social movements in India and the United States.
Eventually, the McCulloughs realized the growing applicant pool to their summer program consisted of exactly the students whom top colleges said they wanted to recruit. So the couple began approaching admissions officers with plans for a new program the colleges would help pay for. QuestBridge uses traditional databases, like those with SAT scores, as well as networks of high school teachers and others to recruit students. It has an early application deadline, in late September, and a long application form, designed to get students to tell the story of their lives.
(L to R) Top row: Kemi A. Oyewole, Uzoma Kenneth Orchingwa, Deon Tramaine Jones, Gabrielle Chelsea Newell, and Jessica Laurel Anderson. Second row: Evan Daniel Shepherd, Brandon Kyle Hersey, Akunna Faith Uka, Stefan Terrell Johnson, and Jordan Alyssa Metoyer. The Truman Scholarship Foundation, established by Congress in 1975, has announced 62 winners of Truman Scholarships for 2013. The 62 winners were selected from a field of 629 candidates nominated by 293 colleges and universities. Each winner receives up to $30,000 for graduate study. Winners also receive an admissions edge at partnering universities, career and graduate counseling, and internship opportunities with the federal government. Since the awards were first made in 1977, there have been 2,906 Truman Scholars. This year it appears that 10 of the 62 winners are African Americans. Kemi A. Oyewole is a junior at Spelman College in Atlanta, where she is majoring in economics and mathematics. She also is the student representative on the college’s board of trustees. Oyewole plans on pursuing a Ph.D. in economics and hopes to have a career as an economist focusing on poverty issues in sub-Saharan Africa. Uzoma Kenneth Orchingwa is a native of Chicago but lived for several years in Nigeria. He is a junior at Colby College in Maine, where he is majoring in philosophy and sociology. Orchingwa plans on attending law school and hopes to have a career in civil rights law.
(L-R) Spelman board member Vickie Palmer, Keshia Knight Pulliam, Rosalind G. Brewer, Dr. Beverly Tatum, Millie Smith
Keshia Knight Pulliam helped to raise more than $1 million for her alma mater, reports the YBF blog. The former “Cosby Show” co-star, who graduated in 2001 with a B.A. in Sociology and a concentration in film, teamed with Spelman College Board Members to host a Fall Fashion Presentation and fundraiser at SAKS in Atlanta.
Among the attendees: Ne-Yo’s fiancee Monyetta Shaw, Spelman College President Dr. Beverly Tatum, actress LaTanya Richardson and Andrew Young’s wife Carolyn Young. The luncheon included a champagne toast and live auction. The money raised will go toward scholarships to benefit Spelman students who are unable to graduate due to financial hardship.
ATLANTA – A popular and influential collection of artwork featuring African leaders and rulers has returned for public viewing at Morehouse College in Atlanta. Valued at more than $1 million, “The Great Kings and Queens of Africa” collection of paintings was commissioned by Anheuser-Busch in 1975. Today, the company announced it has donated the entire collection to UNCF (United Negro College Fund), the country’s largest minority education organization, which will distribute pieces from the collection to six UNCF member colleges and universities: Morehouse College, Clark Atlanta University, Fisk University, Xavier University, Dillard University and Benedict College.
BIRMINGHAM, Ala.- Regions Financial (NYSE:RF) today announced the formation of the Regions HBCU Partnership, a collaboration with six Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the Southeastern United States supporting financial education, academics, athletics, and alumni engagement. The Regions HBCU Partnership kicks off during the fall of 2012 at the following institutions, with plans to expand the program to additional HBCUs in the future:
The Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF) has announced that it has entered into a multi-year $1.7 million partnership with the Wells Fargo Foundation to provide scholarships and leadership development training for students at 47 state-operated historically Black colleges and universities. To qualify for the scholarships students at the HBCUs need to have a grade point average of 3.0 or above, demonstrate financial need, and show the potential for leadership. In addition, Wells Fargo will continue to support the TMCF’s Teacher Quality and Retention Program (TQRP) that supports Black men who are committed to a career in teaching. “Thanks to Wells Fargo’s generosity and ongoing partnership, a cadre of extremely talented future leaders will be able to earn a college degree,” said Johnny C. Taylor, Jr., TMCF’s president and CEO. “In addition, Wells Fargo’s commitment allows HBCU’s to continue their tradition of producing highly qualified and committed classroom teachers. Wells Fargo’s support to the TQRP initiative will have a lasting impact, helping us educate American children in communities all across the country.” article via jbhe.com
Col. John McKee’s vision of his legacy, meticulously recorded in his will, was breathtaking:
A garrisonlike naval academy would grace the bank of the Delaware River in Bristol. A bronze replica of the colonel on horseback would survey the boys who traversed the integrated campus. Embossed on their brass buttons would be the name of McKee, said to be the richest African American at his death in 1902.
History did not quite unfold according to McKee’s plan.
Today, McKee remains an obscure giant of Philadelphia history, a businessman whose achievements in life have been at least matched by his contribution in death.
He is responsible for considerably more than 1,000 scholarships given to fatherless boys during the last 57 years, according to the administrator of a trust he endowed. In the last 10 years alone, the McKee Scholarships have funded almost $4 million for the postsecondary education of 239 young men.
And yet for 89 years, he lay in an unmarked grave; not the brick-and-marble family vault he ordered in his will, not even in his original plot.
McKee wrote his will almost two years before his death, drafting exactly how he wanted to be remembered. But even with a fortune estimated at $2 million, in death he quickly lost control of events.
Born in Alexandria, Va., McKee made his way at 21 to Philadelphia in the early 1840s.
He initially found work in a livery stable and then a restaurant at Eighth and Market Streets owned by James Prosser, a well-known African American caterer. McKee married Prosser’s daughter Emeline, and ran the restaurant until 1866, before he started buying property throughout Philadelphia.
At his death, his holdings were an empire: more than 300 rental houses in the city, as well as his own house at 1030 Lombard St., an estate in Bristol Township, Bucks County, and several hundred thousand acres throughout West Virginia, Georgia, and Kentucky.
Every year, the Gates Millennium Scholars (GMS) Program selects 1,000 talented minority students to receive a good-through-graduation scholarship to use at any college or university of their choice. The program provides scholars with personal and professional development through our leadership programs along with academic support throughout their college career.
The Walt Disney Company recently announced a $1 million commitment to the United Negro College Fund (UNCF).
The Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF) has announced that it has entered into a multi-year $1.7 million partnership with the Wells Fargo Foundation to provide scholarships and leadership development training for students at 47 state-operated historically Black colleges and universities.
