CU donation celebration

Supporting students: CU Junior Communication major Bradley Johnson looks over scholarship applications on the Cameron website. The Helen W. Holliday Foundation in Lawton has donated almost $520,000 in its 26 years of donations.
Supporting students: CU Junior Communication major Bradley Johnson looks over scholarship applications on the Cameron website. The Helen W. Holliday Foundation in Lawton has donated almost $520,000 in its 26 years of donations.

Tyler Boydston

Staff Writer

Cameron University was recently the recipient of $50,000 from the Helen W. Holliday Foundation in Lawton.

The foundation began donating to Cameron in 1988 and has given the school almost $520,000 in its 26 years of donations.

Vice President of University Advancement Albert Johnson said the money from the donation will go toward scholarships and helping more students in their endeavors to continue their education.

“There’s actually a scholarship in her name, and that’s where the money goes,” Johnson said. “It is designed to assist students in bettering their lives. There’s a local flavor to it. This most recent gift, the trustees of the foundation allowed us to use those funds as we deemed most appropriate as long as it’s related to scholarships.”

The Helen W. Holliday Foundation was founded in 1974, two years after Holliday’s passing, and was created to improve educational opportunities within the Lawton-Fort Sill community.

According to Johnson, the Helen Holliday scholarship at Cameron is one of many endowed scholarships, which students can attained by completing the general scholarship application.

“Any student attending Cameron University can go to the Cameron webpage, and there is a general scholarship application form that they can fill out, and what we’ll do is take that and apply their name against other scholarships on campus,” Johnson said. “In the case of a student who would like to identify a specific scholarship, they can go again to the website, and there is a listing of endowed scholarships. They can scroll down, and next to each endowed scholarship, there is a short description of what that scholarship is.

Cameron University currently has 63 endowed scholarships from different foundations and individuals.

Johnson said endowed scholarships must contain a minimum of $10,000 in order for the benefits to continue through the years.

“We provide scholarships off of the revenue of the interest that comes from those endowments, so they are permanently a part of Cameron University,” Johnson said. “The higher the scholarship, the more revenue comes in from that scholarship, and we can give out more to students. The beauty of that is we do have donors that contribute to the base of that scholarship each year.”

Donations in the form of scholarships can be less than $10,000; however, they will not be lasting.

“Some don’t have an endowment of $10,000 or more. Some have less than that, but they want to have an impact on students, and so they will give money that they know will be gone as soon as it’s given out to students,” Johnson explained.

According to Johnson, gifts like the Helen W. Holliday Foundation’s $50,000 donation to the university have helped make Cameron a more affordable destination for college students.

“Because of gifts like that, it allows students to come here. It’s one of the reasons Cameron University is so affordable. It’s one of the reasons why 64 percent of our graduates in 2013 graduated with no debt,” Johnson said. “It is because of private donations that allow us to provide our students with scholarship opportunities that allow them to continue their education.”

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