Last year I had an idea to give away a scholarship that was personally meaningful to me.
My initial thinking was to contact my university to set up the scholarship, but was told that in order for me to give away a scholarship I would have to give $250K for them upfront to manage it in the endowment and ensure that it would be given in perpetuity. Let’s just say that was major league money requirement and I could only afford the little league.
My next step was to go through a non-profit to help me give away my scholarship, but I couldn’t find a non-profit that was open and flexible about the scholarship. I had to either make it very specific to a community, or a cause (cancer survivors) and give away a lot of control on how the scholarship would be managed and selected.
My next step was to then make up my own non-profit, but that was going to take a lot of time, filings and lawyers. But then I thought: Once I set up a non-profit, it would be so easy for me to then create all sorts of scholarships with various criteria. So what if I set up the non-profit so that it would allow other people to do what I originally wanted to do – set up a personally meaningful scholarship with custom criteria of who and why they wanted to award the scholarship. So that gave birth to ScholarFund.
