Meeting the Challenge

 

In order to address the wide disparity in the academic success of Houston’s Asian immigrant families, we propose to expand our current scholarship program.

 

With a current average of 125 entries for scholarships each year, we plan to award more scholarships and provide greater support to our awardees. We annually raise enough funds to be able to provide at least ten $1,000 scholarships. While we select the most deserving students from our candidate pool, we are aware there are many more students, “late bloomers,” who have great potential but have a lower GPA and therefore cannot compete for most scholarship opportunities. With the additional funds from our corporate partners, we will be able to help a greater number of deserving students.

 

Additionally, instead of using all of our volunteer corps to raise additional funds, we plan to deploy some of them to begin tracking our awardees and following them throughout their college career. We propose to continue supporting them by providing a college resource consultant who will hold an annual seminar to help them learn how to apply for additional grants and loans when they reach the quarter and/or half-way mark as undergraduates, critical junctures when many students run out of funds and must drop out of college.

 

Although there are other organizations in the Asian community who award scholarships, we will be the only one who will follow the awardees and continue to assist them as needed.