2012-05-15
New fund creates scholarship for health career education
The family of Margaret Loos Spencer, a former resident of the Sundale Rehabilitation and Long-Term Care Center in Morgantown, has created a scholarship fund in her honor to provide financial assistance to a participant in a health career education program.
Eligible for the Margaret L. Spencer Health Career Education Scholarship are current caregivers and other service staff who have worked at Sundale for three or more years or members of their immediate families. Secondary preference will be given to department heads, administrators and persons who already have a degree, certificate or license in a health care profession or members of immediate families.
The scholarship, established by her sonsDon and David Spencer, will be managed by Your Community Foundation (YCF), which will invest the endowed funds to maximize their value, with net annual income from those investments used to fund the scholarship award each year.
“Margaret grew up in rural Delaware County, New York, and lost her parents by age 13,” said Beth Fuller, president of YCF. “She went to nursing school with a high school friend and used her education to support her family and to serve the communities where she lived throughout her life. She cared deeply about education and was a compassionate caregiver. She also believed that people must rise to meet the challenges they face.”
“Throughout her adult life, she lived with an awareness of where she had come from coupled with ingrained values for working to make things better in the church and communities of which she was a part,” Don Spencer said. “Part of her drive came from having lost both parents to illnesses and having an older sister crippled for life by polio at the age of five. Extended family members living in smaller rural communities provided a very different home for her at the age of 13, and her sense of caring and working to make things right continued with her for the rest of her life.”
From 2009-11, she was a resident of Sundale, where she and her family greatly appreciated the care and patience she was provided by the staff, Spencer said. “Upon Margaret’s death, as a tribute to her life, we wanted to establish a means to encourage interested hands-on caregivers and service personnel and their family members to begin additional education in a health career of their choice.”
Many of her caregivers had had experiences similar to hers, he noted. “Most live in rural areas and commute to work at Sundale,” Spencer said. “They have found employment in health care, and so many of the staff perform their work very carefully and thoroughly.”
The Spencer scholarship will provide an annual award toward the first-year tuition for a participant in any health career education program which provides a degree, certification or license. The first applications for the award will be received May 1 by the Sundale administration and reviewed by YCF to select the 2012 recipient.