If you’ve been following the blog for years, you will have known that eight years ago, I started a scholarship for SHPE UA (Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, University of Arizona chapter) to give students the opportunity to go to the SHPE National Convention.
I started this scholarship because when I was in college, I didn’t have the funds to attend a convention like this that would give me professional opportunities and the ability to attend life changing workshops. I was able to go to a convention my senior year because of a scholarship so I wanted to give back.
In the last eight years of the scholarship, a small but mighty group of SHPE UA alumni (and friends) have raised over $44,000 and sent over 148 students to the Convention and we continue to grow each year thanks to our wonderful alumni and friends of SHPE UA. Many people have asked me how I got started in order to start their own scholarship so I decided to share this information here instead of emailing it out.
See below for the logistics on starting a scholarship. I’m happy to discuss further and answer any questions. Here are the steps I took to get it started, keep in mind this scholarship is donation driven but because SHPE UA is a non-profit, companies and restaurants can match donations and also donate.
- Create an ‘alumni/donor’ list of people that you want to reach out to so that you can ask for donations. I started with a list of friends and now I ask the SHPE UA chapter for their list of graduating seniors to grow our list. We originally collected donations via Venmo/Paypal/Checks but now we have transitioned to using the U of A crowdfunding platform which is a lot easier!
- Get the tax information from SHPE UA (or the organization you wish to help) so that you can make sure donations are tax deductible (this helps to encourage people to donate). This should be pretty easy to get from any high school or college as they have systems already in place.
- Get the proper accounts for how people will be able to donate: Venmo/Paypal/Crowdfunding websites are all an option. You can also use a website like GoFundMe but a lot of schools have websites they use. I donate to my friend’s elementary school and they use this website.
- Send out information to the alumni on where their money will go to (conference related expenses (registration, lodging, transportation, etc).
- I have an email that I send out every year to start the process – let me know if you’d like me to send it to you!
- I have a schedule because people like deadlines and I create this schedule with the student group to make sure we are able to present the winners of the scholarship at their meetings.
- We also include the perk that every winner gets invited to a speed mentoring/interview session to prepare them for convention. You can do something like this for the high school students, just determine what they need help with.
I also originally did all the work myself but throughout the years I have added 3 other alumni to my Core Team which has made a huge difference.
Let me know if you have any questions. I am happy to help, good luck!
Thank you all for reading, and stay enthusiastic!
Feel free to follow the adventure on social media
Facebook / Instagram / Twitter / Youtube
-Maira