Leadership: Stewardship

Gifts go directly to the Foundation Endowment, as prescribed by the Foundation By-Laws. The Foundation's scholarship budget each year is limited to the earnings generated by the Endowment investment fund.

Board members, who are all Sunset graduates, have never received any remuneration except the joy that comes with helping others, an ample reward to say the least. In fact, each has made significant financial contributions to the Foundation and has invested extensive time and effort. Further, there are no paid staff members. Except for routine tax, accounting, and bookkeeping expenses, all activities for fundraising, school interaction, scholarship selection and award, legal support, etc., are handled on a volunteer basis by Sunset graduates and friends. This use of volunteers and the diligent practice of holding related expenses to a bare minimum have resulted in a low ratio of cumulative expenses to cumulative contributions.

Realizing the rapidly increasing costs of higher education, the Board, as another step toward good stewardship, has worked diligently to ensure that scholarship awards benefit the maximum feasible number of students. That is, rather than attempting to provide very large, four-year scholarship awards to a very few students, the Board has adopted and implemented the philosophy of providing incentive awards to more students.

This approach has proven to be very successful and is having a major impact on students. Experience has shown that, once the motivated student has received even a taste of higher education progress, he/she has found some way to continue that progress --- by working part or full time, and/or handling expenses efficiently, and/or seeking other scholarship support from his/her respective institution of higher education, etc.

For example, the quality and determination of the scholarship students is shown by the fact that some who were given very small stipends by the Foundation have begun by working part time and taking a couple of courses and have subsequently been sufficiently resourceful to earn masters degrees.