Good Morning All,
So I am struggling with our universities Financial Aid Office and am
wondering how others in higher ed deal with this situation.
Our foundation is an institutionally related foundation to the university.
All of our scholarships are donor funded with agreements in place. My
situation revolves around crisis awards.
We offer a variety of crisis awards to students in financial need in
amounts that vary between $100-1,000 depending on their situation. We
follow the donor criteria and the students fill out an application as well
as submits an essay about their situation. All due diligence is done to
evaluate the application and merit of the request, info is gather rapidly
from many sources..We turn these around within 24 hrs typically.
The foundation makes an award with input from the Financial Aid Office
(sometimes not but rarely) and a lot are questioned by the FA Director.
They argue it is not worth it, the student has more problems then a $500
award can assist with and so on.
1) How does your foundation manage crisis awards?
2) Are applications processed by Fin Aid first then routed to the
foundation?
3) Are all applications routed first through the foundation?
4) Do you pass the available money on to FA and they manage the whole
process independent from the foundation with no oversight?
If you are willing to share your guidelines/processes with me I would
greatly appreciate it.
Thank you in advance for your thoughts!
Gerri Silveira
University Advancement
EOU Foundation
eou.edu/foundation <https://www.eou.edu/foundation/>
*High Quality Programs,** Access for All, **Live Learn Succeed*