Over the span of less than a year, ARROW, our amateur radio club, has lost two of its long-time members: Clay, W8JNZ, and Roger, W8ZRF. Clay passed in December 2017, Roger in October 2018. These guys headed up our first VE team, were great hams, and great human beings.
When Clay died, I got it into my head that I wanted to start a scholarship in his name. He was always ready to help young people get started in the hobby. I contacted the local community college and got in touch with a fellow who headed up their foundation, who explained to me all the ins and outs of doing this.
Alas, it proved to be more work that I thought originally, and I put it on the back burner. When Roger passed a couple of months ago, I decided to give it another try. As a way to get us started, Roger’s family agreed to donate his equipment, which we are now in the process of selling, with the proceeds going to the scholarship fund. Roger didn’t have a lot of modern gear, but even so, I’m estimating that we’ll net over $1,000 by the time we’re through selling his stuff.
I think that our club is good for probably another $1,000, but after that, I’m not really sure how to go about raising the rest of the money. I had thought about setting up a GoFundMe, but have never really done that before. I had thought about writing a grant proposal for part of the funding. Clay was a vice president of DTE, our local electrical utility, and they have a foundation that awards grants to various charitable organizations. I’m not sure that this scholarship fund is something that they’d be willing to donate to.
If any of you have ever done something like this, or if your club has funded a scholarship like this, I’d like to hear from you. I need all the help I can get here.
Dear Dan:
I am an ARRL life member and a ham since 1976. For the last thirty years, I have worked in the advancement office at the small private college in my town, recording and receipting charitable donations and performing many ancillary duties.
Establishing a memorial scholarship fund is a wonderful way to remember someone. I perceive that you have already ascertained that it’s nontrivial to pull off, too! Here are a few thoughts off the top of my head:
1) How much money can you raise in a reasonable period of time? This, of course, will set the limits of what you can do to remember this gentleman. $1,000-$2,000ish dollars? You might fund a brick in his name in ARRL’s Diamond Terrace. It might also be possible for you to make a one-time award to provide scholarship assistance to a deserving individual. The holy grail of scholarship funds, though, is an endowed fund, money that is retained and invested, with the return on investment used to fund scholarships essentially in perpetuity. Usually the minimum amount needed to achieve this will be in the $25,000 range and up. How on earth do you reach such an amount? In my experience, the bulk of the money for a successfully funded endowed scholarship usually comes from surviving family members of the deceased individual. The total is reached through the combined donations of multiple, sufficiently well-off individuals, often paying in installments over a period of up to perhaps five years. Of course, this delays the date that the first award can be made from investment earnings. A way to mitigate that is to find someone who will pony up money to be disbursed “now” rather than added to the endowment fund.
Thoughts on other sources of funding:
* University classmates
* Members of professional organizations or societies that the silent key belonged to
* Probably not private foundations. They rarely seem to be interested in funding scholarship endowments (again, just in my experience).
2) Assuming that you can achieve the minimum to establish an endowed scholarship fund, how and where do you set up such a thing?
My answer is: at an organization that already successfully administers similar funds. What can this do for you?
* You don’t have to try to jump through IRS qualification hoops trying to set up a private foundation or public charity all on your own, in order to make donations to the fund tax-deductible. An organization that has already run this gauntlet can accept donations and issue receipts that can potentially be used to substantiate a deduction on the donor’s tax return. Not a public charity and simply using an online fund-raising portal like GoFundMe? No tax deduction for the donors.
https://support.gofundme.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001977388-How-to-Get-on-the-GoFundMe-Charity-List
* An existing public charity has the infrastructure and professional expertise you will need to keep this fund going for the long term: multiple ways to accept gifts (cash, checks, credit cards over the internet, marketable securities); assistance in establishing scholarship administration/award guidelines and in selection of recipients; accounting staff to issue periodic financial reports that fund-raising staff can then provide to the above-mentioned family-member donors, along with thank-you letters they have obtained from grateful scholarship recipients; a professionally managed endowment pool to provide a decent return on investment along with risk management; and, overall, the continuity and stability over time that a well-intentioned individual or group of individuals probably can’t muster on a sustained basis.
You might consider chatting with the development staff at ARRL:
http://www.arrl.org/contact-us
http://www.arrl.org/the-arrl-foundation
I hope some part of this hurried, late-night ramble is of help to you. Good luck in remembering your friend!
73,
James, NB0Z
One follow-up note: Another organization I have identified that administers amateur radio scholarships and has IRS public charity status is The Foundation for Amateur Radio. (As an example, Ten-Ten International’s scholarship fund is administered by this organization.) See:
http://www.amateurradio-far.org/