#8 on my list of 50 things to do before I turn 50 was to establish a scholarship. I can’t really take credit for this except in a brokerage capacity, since it’s funded by my parents, but I’m still proud of the fact that the Oliver-Breeze-Kennedy Undergraduate Scholarships in Technical Communication and Digital Literacies have been announced in my former academic home, the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at UALR. They’ll provide annual awards to two advanced undergraduates.

The long-ish family name honors generations of women who scrimped and saved and encouraged the next in the line to dream larger. Mom described this so well in one of the emails that flew back and forth during the process of setting things up:

My great-grandmother was a farm woman on the Missouri prairie in the late 1800s with little education; her main achievements were survival and raising nine children to be respectable citizens. My grandmother had only a junior high education, but she dreamed large well into her 80s and managed to accomplish many things beyond the expectations of her class and educational limitations. While I was growing up, she told me many times that her assets probably would never benefit her, or my mother, but perhaps they would edge me toward a better life. She also managed to pass on the value of dreams and her can-do attitude. My mother likewise was frugal and dedicated to helping future generations succeed - like so many women of the WWII generation, she finished high school and had a promising career which she gave up when she married my father. I was admitted to one of the Seven Sisters on scholarship but turned down the opportunity because my mother ironically did not want me moving 'so far away'. I managed two years of college but also eventually had to choose work rather than pursuit of an education. [...] Because both of us know how little it takes to destroy dreams and how long it takes to scratch together the means to achieve them, we would like to help a few people keep their visions afloat.

I wouldn’t have been able to finish my BAs without the UPS tuition reimbursement program, which paid for nearly 100% of my costs, and my graduate life has been made easier through both corporate fellowships (the Veritas fellowship during my first year of PhD coursework) and privately funded awards (last year's teaching award funded by the Brown family).

Now that my family is doing a bit better financially, it’s wonderful to be able to either pay a little back or pay a little forward, depending on how you look at it. Lotsa thanks is due to our ancestresses, my parents, and to my old teaching mentor, Chuck Anderson, for chairing the scholarship committee and doing the legal wrangling to make this happen.