Student Stories

Chris Rose, a Scholarship Foundation voter engagement fellow and an Ava’s Grace scholar, is an “open book” and he has a lot to say about turning his personal circumstances into opportunities to...

DeAndre Ross, an assistant project manager at Gafcon, Inc. in Los Angeles, is putting both his engineering training and his people skills to work every day on large building projects. DeAndre says,...

Candice Clossum’s love of serving others began early. She remembers being eight years old and helping her aunt at a community food pantry. She says the experience helped mold her, and she...

Anne Marie Crane always planned to go to college, but she knew that it would be difficult to afford. She says, “My mom heavily instilled in me the importance of education, and...

By Debra Kennard, Board of Directors Kyle Lackey counts among some of the best advice he’s received about college the words of a high school social studies teacher who told him to...

By Debra Kennard, Board of Directors When Vivian Garcia Cruz was asked to participate in the Project Know Us digital storytelling project, she relished thinking about how to organize her thoughts and...

By Debra Kennard, Board of Directors   French philosopher Diderot wrote an essay Paradox of the Actor, which asserts great actors do not experience on stage the emotions they are displaying. One...

By Debra Kennard, Board of Directors   Photographs help Claudia Romero remember mileposts from her childhood. She has photos of family gatherings in Mexico, a birthday celebration in Georgia, beach days in...

In 2014, Mikayla Jo Ecker met Scholarship Foundation Advising Director Teresa Steinkamp who had visited Mikayla’s high school, Northwest R-1, to help students with the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA)....

Class of 2019 Environmental Science Drake University “I learned that if you want something, you can’t let other people’s attitudes stop you. If you see that nobody else is working on something...

Class of 2020 Medicine University of Missouri- Kansas City I have been a recipient of the Ava’s Grace Scholarship and the Interest-Free Loan for many years and it has greatly shouldered the...

Class of 2019 Engineering Southern Illinois University Edwardsville “I am very excited to be able to do this… I will be working with real world engineers and learning from them.” When Diego...