The Future of Us provides character-based scholarships to high school seniors. Rather than judging students by their gpa, ACT score, or other on-paper statistics that try to quantify how good of a candidate they are, we consider the actual person that we are investing in. We like our awardees to be motivated, kind, charitable, hardworking, humble, honest, creative, passionate, etc.
Our process of selecting a winner is as follows:
Our process of selecting a winner is as follows:
- Applicants submit a work that they feel most effectively conveys a message of their choosing. This can be a response to one (or more) of the prompts that we provide or the topic can be chosen by the students themselves. They can choose to respond with a full-length essay or they have the option to submit a non-traditional body of work (a short creative story, a painting, a video, etc) as long as they provide a written work to supplement their creative one explaining their motivation, the significance of their submission, the impact, or other important details surrounding their work.
- We then choose students to move on to an interview round. When they meet with us, we have a conversation and we get to learn more about them and they get to learn more about us.
- Prior to final selection we may or may not perform a reference check with their school administration or teachers (depending on how passionately we feel about our candidates). And then we choose a winner.
2022
Four Winners!This year, we were able to award scholarships to four incredible young women. All four are very talented and motivated students with big goals. We're honored to be a part of their support system and wish them the best at all they do.
Please click on their picture to learn more about each of them. |
2021
Alaysia DavisAlaysia Davis is a strong, bright young woman with the utmost faith in herself. From a young age she was taught to value servicing others and regularly participated in community support events that were often led by her mother or her church. She continues to participate in these events to this day. Her want to service others drives her in both her education and her career goals. She has self-identified the racial biases in the judicial system, noting that people of color generally face more harsh consequences and are not often defended or adjudicated by other people of color. With this in mind, she wants to represent her community by becoming a defense attorney and eventually a judge. In the near term, she is going to attend The University of Nebraska Omaha with plans to transfer to Jackson State University because it has always been her dream to attend a historically black college or university.
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2020
Myati VonziahOur very first winner is a young woman named Myati Vonziah. She’s a first generation Ghanian-American who’s worked very hard to become a first generation college student as well. In high school she was in debate, played soccer, danced, and was in band. She’s very community oriented, frequently volunteering her time to harvesters. She values a strong self-identity, as she is very invested in her own culture, she encourages everyone to “be yourself, be yourself, be yourself.” A proverb she would often be told by her mother while she was growing up is that “a child who can’t hear, can feel” and it has stuck with her into her young adulthood. As she looks toward college, she is motivated and nervous but also excited to meet new people. She wants to work toward obtaining a degree in psychology and then going to law school.
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