Santa Cruz Rotary Endowment

ROTARY CLUB OF SANTA CRUZ ENDOWMENT

In the mid 1970s, Keith and Elinor Shaffer contributed a large sum of money to our Club with the suggestion that the money be used to fund an endowment. A committee was formed, and through its efforts, the Santa Cruz Rotary Endowment was incorporated in 1979. For many years, our Club provided college scholarships to local students. But they were always based on available funds, and there were little, if any, increases from year to year. The Shaffer endowment provided a way to increase the number of scholarships awarded each year. Blessed with astute management and the continued support of Club membership and others, the endowment now provides approximately $120,000 annually for academic scholarships and $17,750 for vocational scholarships.

John and Linda Burroughs Endowment
In 2024, John and Linda Burroughs established a Scholarship Endowment with a contribution of $1,000,000. The SC Rotary Endowment Committee will oversee this additional endowment. The purpose is to give five students $5,000 each for their first and second years of college, for a total of $50,000 per year. They believe that these larger scholarships will inspire students to complete their educational goals. The hope is that the corpus will grow and allow the Trustees to allocate more to the Academic Scholarship Committee for either larger
grants or more recipients.