By Dr. Ross Tomlin, TBCC President
As 2022 comes to an end, it is a great time to reflect on the year and what has been accomplished. This has been an exceptional year for TBCC with the passing of the $14.4M bond to construct a new Healthcare Education Building, developing a new strategic plan to move the college forward for the next seven years, and rebounding with our enrollments from the pandemic to grow 16% and exceed our longstanding goal of 500 full-time equivalent students, just to name a few. But our TBCC Foundation, a separate 501.c.3 organization that helps support our TBCC students through scholarships and fundraising for large college projects, has had an amazing year as well.
The TBCC Foundation is led by Britta Lawrence, who was promoted to the Executive Director role a year ago after being our Development Director for the previous two years. She has added three new board members to the Foundation over this past year, including Joe Warren, Alicia Ritter, and Ann Batchelder. Michael Weissenfluh, a retired TBCC faculty member, is the President of the Foundation Board.
A large part of the work done by the Foundation is raising money for scholarships to help students offset the costs of attending college. This past year, the Foundation gave out over $107,000 in scholarships to TBCC students. We honor the scholarship recipients and donors at the Mildred Davy memorial and Scholarship Recognition Luncheon in October. This year was the first in-person luncheon in three years and was a wonderful event with emotional stories from a board member and a TBCC student.
Many of our scholarships are from endowments that provide money each year from the interest earned. This year, we received a new endowment of $100,000 from Hampton Lumber and Family Forests for our Forestry and Manufacturing and Industrial Technology students. We also received $100,000 from the estate of Ben Nunez to add to his endowment and $25,000 from the Robert Riggert Family Foundation to start a Healthcare Career-to-Career scholarship. A new Arts and Letters Endowment has also just been created in honor of the late John Stahl, a former TBCC Adjunct Faculty member. Stay tuned for more details on the new Stahl Endowment in the TBCC Foundation summer newsletter. These generous donations allow these scholarships to live on into perpetuity for our students.
A big event is planned for this coming January 14 at the Tillamook County Fairgrounds to raise money for our Career-to-Career scholarship program. Career-to-Career scholarships cover all the tuition for a degree or certificate for students that have been out of school for at least five years. The event will be the North Coast Throwdown Cornhole Tournament and will have up to 48 teams competing and having fun. So the college continues to work hard to help our students be successful and reach their educational goals, which does change lives for the better. We are proud of the work of our Foundation and are excited to see the accomplishments achieved in 2023. Next month we will look ahead to the goals set for the rest of this academic year that will continue to move TBCC forward to even more achievements.