It was a record-breaking season for NIRSA Foundation scholarships and stipends! Thank you to everyone who applied. After accounting for eligibility, we received the following qualified applications this year: 147 student applications, 106 professional applications, and 68 travel stipend applications. That’s 50 more eligible applications than we received during the 2018 scholarship application season!

Applicants will be notified of their application status by late December 2018, and scholarship and stipend recipients will be publicly celebrated during the Opening General Session of the 2019 NIRSA Annual Conference & Campus Rec and Wellness Expo.

We want to give a shout out to Core Health & Fitness for presenting the Travel Assistance Stipend and to our corporate partners Matrix Fitness, Sports Imports, and Woodway, for providing three student scholarships to NIRSA 2019. The work of the NIRSA Foundation would not be possible without the unwavering support of our corporate partners. Help us say thank you by visiting their booths at the 2019 NIRSA Campus Rec and Wellness Expo!

Finally, we cannot send enough thanks, love, and appreciation to our NIRSA Foundation donors. The generosity of our NIRSA family support helps us maintain more than 20 endowments and funds from which we’ll award 66 scholarships and more than 30 J. Michael Dunn awards in 2019. Your donations send NIRSA members like Aneury Pichardo, 2018 Mark E. Fletcher Scholarship recipient, to experience the amazing opportunities offered at NIRSA educational events.

Shomari Kee is currently Director of Campus Recreation at Northern Kentucky University; he serves as a member of the NIRSA Foundation Board of Directors. He can be reached at kees1@nku.edu. Lexi Chaput is currently Senior Assistant Director of Recreational Sports at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor; she serves as a member of the NIRSA Foundation Board of Directors. She can be reached at lexic@umich.edu.