University of Hawaiʻi students who receive scholarships don’t always get a chance to meet the people or the representatives of the companies and organizations that fund their scholarships.
So the University of Hawaiʻi Foundation started an annual tradition— the UH Mānoa and UH System Scholarship Celebration. It’s where scholarship student and UH Mānoa sophomore Kadee Kalia Tamashiro met Ted Tsukiyama in 2015. Tsukiyama is responsible for her Varsity Victory Volunteers Scholarship.
“We feel we are an integral part of the university and the university structure,” said Tsukiyama. “An opportunity to provide scholarships, we definitely wanted to be part of that.”
- Learn more about Ted Tsukiyama, the 2012 UH Founders Alumni Association Lifetime Achievement Award winner
The celebration draws hundreds of scholarship students and their benefactors each year.
“It is important because it’s an opportunity for us to thank the donors who have made such a difference in students lives,” said UH Mānoa Chancellor Robert Bley-Vroman. “And for students to meet the donors whose work and whose donations have transformed their own lives.”
In 1976, the first permanently endowed scholarship was created by the UH Foundation to benefit students attending the University of Hawaiʻi. Today, the foundation manages more than 1,500 scholarship accounts. In 2014 alone, students from UH’s ten campuses received more than $11 million in scholarship aid from the foundation. Of that, $8 million supported 3,000 UH Mānoa students.
“Glad to see that there is this momentum to recognize and to help needy students, who otherwise might not be able to get an education,” said Tsukiyama.
“Having these scholarships has really allowed me to not focus so much on the financial burden of getting a degree,” said Tamashiro. “It has allowed me to participate in a lot of extracurricular activities, social life, a lot of things so, it’s just a really big help.”
