High school students and retirees can benefit from Foundation’s offerings
Since its inception in 1921, The Dayton Foundation has awarded more than $1.1 billion in grants, with nearly $68 million awarded last fiscal year. The organization recently announced updates for two programs that bookend personal legacies for greater Dayton residents.
The Foundation announced its 2023-2024 scholarship application process and will offer students access to ScholarshipCONNECTSM, an online scholarship search and college readiness resource. Students can access ScholarshipCONNECT by visiting www.daytonfoundation.org/scholars.
ScholarshipCONNECT offers nearly 300 scholarship opportunities through The Dayton Foundation and educational foundations that are part of the Foundation. The system uses a detailed questionnaire to match students, based upon their educational interests and background, to possible scholarship opportunities. Students and parents also can help plan and pay for college by accessing links to online financial aid, scholarship and loan resources, and tools, such as a college debt calculator.
In fiscal year 2021-2022, The Dayton Foundation and the Dayton-Montgomery County Scholarship Program, a component fund of The Dayton Foundation since 2006, awarded nearly $2.3 million in scholarships to help 1,048 students advance their educational goals.
The deadline to submit a completed ScholarshipCONNECT online application is 4 p.m. Friday, March 3. For more information and success stories from previous years’ scholarship recipients, visit ScholarshipCONNECT, or connect with The Dayton Foundation on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter.
The Dayton Foundation also released the list of eight highly skilled older adults who have been selected as the newest fellows for The Dayton Foundation’s Del Mar Encore Fellows Initiative, which deploys retired or career-transitioning older adults to work on significant community issues. Each Fellow brings new sources of talent and experience to nonprofit organizations tackling critical needs in Greater Dayton.
Since its launch in 2017, the Del Mar Encore Fellows Initiative has placed fellows with 15 organizations and have contributed more than 30,000 hours of work, providing an estimated $2.1 million in value to the Greater Dayton economy. This work is made possible by a generous grant from the DMH-Dayton Fund of The Dayton Foundation.
Providing oversight of the initiative is new Senior Fellow Leigh Sempeles, JD. Sempeles joined the Foundation in 2021 as a Del Mar Encore Fellow working in partnership with the Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission’s Institute for Livable and Equitable Communities to establish nine area communities as part of AARP’s Network of Age-Friendly States and Communities. Thanks in part to her leadership, the Miami Valley is now Ohio’s first designated Age-Friendly Region.
Serving for the next two years as Del Mar Encore Fellows include: Saundra Collie, working with Learn to Earn Dayton and school district leaders on an innovative early literacy model; Sharon Hawkins, who will join the University of Dayton’s Fitz Center for Leadership in Community to develop and implement a Health Equity Activation Think Tank to improve the health outcomes of historically and systemically underserved Daytonians; Leah Konicki, assisting Miami Valley Housing Opportunities in seeking new ways to serve vulnerable populations in the community; Jane McGee-Rafal, helping Learn to Earn Dayton launch the Miami Valley Early Grade Literacy Collaborative to promote evidence-based literacy practices and strategies; Pam Morgan, helping the University of Dayton launch the Brain Health Collaboratory to provide research, education, outreach and clinical opportunities for students and the Greater Dayton community; Dan Thaxton, who joined the Montgomery County Ohio College Promise to help develop a sustainable pool of future mentors for students enrolled in the program; and Dr. Deborah Wilcox, working with The Dayton Foundation’s Nonprofit Capacity-Building Partnership initiative to help design a comprehensive impact evaluation model to assess and analyze facets of capacity building through a racial equity lens.
For more information about the Del Mar Encore Fellows Initiative, please contact Leigh Sempeles, senior fellow, at lsempeles@daytonfoundation.org or (937) 225-9949.
