Premier Members Credit Union held its first annual Celebration of Giving event on Monday, May 15 at the Butterfly Pavilion.
As part of Premier Members Credit Union Premier Gives Pillar, we have been offering scholarships and grants to our communities. Monday night we celebrated the scholarship and grant recipients with an event to remember.
We expanded our scholarship program for high school seniors from two to five $5,000 scholarships this year. It is apparent that these scholarships are important as we had 123 applications for the five scholarships. A scholarship committee of eight employees read, reviewed, and scored the applications. We are thrilled to announce that our five $5,000 scholarships were awarded to the following seniors:
Taylor Eskew, Windsor High School who will attend Chapman University next fall.
Santiago Saenz, Monarch High School who will attend Boston college next fall.
Josue Hernandez Gerrero, Boulder High School who will attend Northeastern University next fall.
Arenn Banks, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Early College who will attend Howard University next fall.
Ciara Reyes, Centennial High School, who will attend University of Colorado Boulder next fall.
This was the first year we had an application-based nonprofit grant program. The criteria for this cycle was simple, but the most important aspect was that a qualifying organization must have an operating budget of less than $2 million to maximize the credit union’s impact on these vital organizations. Of these five inaugural grantee organizations, there was only a combined operating budget of $470,000. In addition, in this first year, there were 41 applications for these five nonprofit grants. The $5,000 grants were awarded to the following nonprofit organizations:
Colorado Association for Bilingual Education
Estes Park Education Foundation
Qualified Listeners Corporation
“The pandemic amplified just how much we and our communities rely on these important services, whether they represent Education, Healthcare both physical and mental, basic human needs and rights and the Arts, as well as ongoing support of our Veterans community,” Jeffrey Kash, Associate Vice President, Community Relations, “Tonight’s presentation and community investment in our grantee and scholars is just one part of our Premier Gives Pillar, which just last year provided over 1200 hours of community outreach donated by our employees, and over $500,000 in financial community outreach support and investment.
