$2,000 Rotary Scholarship

Rotary Scholarship
by Laura Bell

Residents encouraged to apply

The Rotary Club of Big Sky is once again awarding a scholarship to a Big Sky resident attending a college or vocational post-high school program. This is the third successive year that the Rotary is offering the $2,000 scholarship which benefits a member of the community.
The criteria for the scholarship will be based on financial need, community service and academic performance. Each application will be reviewed by a committee of three Rotarians and a winner will be announced prior to June 15th.
The deadline for applications is May 15th, 2008. All information provided to the review committee will be kept strictly confidential to the members of that committee.
The scholarship will be awarded directly to the student upon receipt of a tuition bill.
“This is an opportunity to motivate those individual students who are inspired to further their education and strengthen themselves,” said local Rotarian Buzzy Vick.
The Rotary Club of Big Sky is able to give this scholarship as a result of the community’s generous support of the gold raffle.
This year’s gold raffle raised more than $34,000 to support humanitarian projects. Funds from last year’s raffle contributed to the following: procurement and installation of emergency call boxes in the Gallatin Canyon, a college scholarship to a Big Sky resident, recognizing an Ophir Student of the Quarter with a savings bond, drilling a well in Zambia to provide clean, safe water to two community schools and the adjacent villages, drilling community wells to provide potable water to rural villages in Honduras and creation of Saheli Centres for Women, vocational training facilities to uplift the status of women in India.
The Big Sky Rotary Chapter contributes to the Rotary Foundation and Rotary International. In 2003 Rotarians raise more than US$118 million to support the final stages of polio eradication. This is the largest single project that Rotary International has undertaken and there are only four countries in the world where polio is still a life-threatening disease. The fight to completely eradicate polio continues as a major Rotary project.
Rotary is a worldwide organization of business and professional leaders that provides humanitarian service, encourages high ethical standards in all vocations, and helps build goodwill and peace in the world. Approximately 1.2 million Rotarians belong to more than 32,000 clubs in more than 200 countries and geographical areas.
The Object of Rotary is to encourage and foster the ideal of service as a basis of worthy enterprise and, in particular, to encourage and foster: first: The development of acquaintance as an opportunity for service; second: High ethical standards in business and professions, the recognition of the worthiness of all useful occupations, and the dignifying of each Rotarian's occupation as an opportunity to serve society; third: The application of the ideal of service in each Rotarian's personal, business, and community life; and fourth: The advancement of international understanding, goodwill, and peace through a world fellowship of business and professional persons united in the ideal of service.

For more information on the Rotary Scholarship, please call Buzzy Vick at 995-4476 or Kathy Bouchard at 995-3861 or Wendy Rogers at 995-2744.

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