Building a Scholarship With Impact: Behind the Dream Award
In 2013, Scholarship America fostered the sort of association all not-for-profits long for: columnist Katie Couric, roused by our story and our organizer, vowed to give the benefits from her first book to our association, which lead to the beginning of the Dream Award, a grant with sway.
We promptly realized we needed to utilize Couric’s gift to enrich another sort of grant program-one that could have a genuine effect on a populace of understudies seeking after advanced education that weren’t getting the assistance they required. One that we could hold to act as an illustration of grant the executives best practices.
We explored school measurements and evaluation information and talked with our accomplished program fashioners to distinguish a populace out of luck: understudies who’d beat difficulty to get into school, however whose monetary guide and grant grants were a sufficient amount to assist them with paying for their first year.
These understudies, notwithstanding being not set in stone, were in danger of exiting before graduation, burdened with educational loan obligation and no degree. Pell Grants, the most liberal government help for low-pay understudies, just cover about ¼ of the normal expense of school making low-pay and original understudies multiple times bound to nonconformist.
We laid out the Scholarship America Dream Award to straightforwardly address and keep this from occurring. Download our new Dream Award Case Study to learn exhaustively the way that we made it happen, or read on for an outline.
Why The Dream Award is Different
Our objective with the Dream Award is to permit understudies to zero in on school, complete their undergrad training and be ready for the subsequent stage in their excursion – regardless it is.
To do as such, we zeroed in on a couple of significant advancements:
Expanding Access to Increase Impact: we guaranteed that the qualification rules were clear, succinct and wide-running.
Monetary Support that Follows the Student: the Dream Award isn’t just a sustainable grant, however it develops by $1,000 every year to mirror the yearly expanding cost of school participation.
Support Beyond the Scholarship: Dream Award Scholars get to interface with one another and with allies and business pioneers at our yearly Dreams to Success Celebration in Washington, D.C. (which was held basically in 2020, with exceptional visitors and recordings from the most up to date Scholars.) As one Scholar said: “The DC occasion caused me to feel enabled and that I merited the grant. Organizing with different victors … likewise gave point of view on who individuals are that have confidence in us: the benefactors and the Scholarship America representatives.”
Huge Dreams, Bright Futures
Following five years, Dream Award Scholars are graduating with different degrees in various fields of study. They’re following their interests like science, language, civil rights, business venture or public help.
Also they’re proceeding with their schooling: a big part of all beneficiaries have said they’re ready to seek after an alumni or postgraduate education because of the Dream Award. They’ve had the option to jump all over new chances to review and reside abroad, to motivate more youthful relatives and to reward their networks one Dream Award Scholar is in any event, filling in as an educator in the grade school where she grew up.
By offering required help to understudies who are ready to do incredible things, the Scholarship America Dream Award is worked to have a genuine effect.