A Community Effort
Alumni, friends, and family fundraise for a scholarship in honor of BLSA's 50th anniversary at BU Law.
A Community Effort
Alumni, friends, and family fundraise for a scholarship in honor of BLSA’s 50th anniversary at BU Law.
Word spread quickly this year after Dean’s Advisory Board member Robin A. Walker (’99) and her husband, Geoffrey Talvola, created a new BU Law scholarship in honor of the Black Law Students Association’s 50th anniversary, along with the fund’s first founding partners Angela Gomes (CAS’01, LAW’05), Terence Rozier-Byrd (’06), and Trevor Rozier-Byrd (’10).
In June, Harrison Freeman (’17) and Shaelyn Gambino Morrison (’17) heard the news of the scholarship. Eager to raise support in honor of this important BLSA milestone, they launched a grassroots fundraising effort among their classmates, friends, family members, and colleagues.
In July alone, 94 of their fellow alumni and friends collectively raised more than $10,000 for the fund. “It is great to see how willing the BU Law community is to donate to an important cause,” says Freeman, “even during a concurrent pandemic and economic recession.”
In August, alum and retired associate dean Ernest M. Haddad (’64) heard that news and was inspired to issue a challenge of his own: he pledged to match all new gifts to the BLSA scholarship up to $20,000, through the end of the year. He figured it would take that long after his email went out to the alumni community.
How long did it actually take? One week.
“The outpouring of support from our community for this fund has been astounding,” Haddad says, “with over 175 donors giving more than $100,000 over the past nine months.” That’s enough to make the BLSA 50th Anniversary Scholarship an endowed fund, so it will now support BU Law students in perpetuity. So far, the BU Law community has donated over $180,000 to the fund, and support continues to come in.
Donors to the scholarship offer a range of reasons for their gifts: gratitude for their own experiences with BLSA, warm memories of Dean Haddad, and the need for greater diversity in the legal profession. Perhaps most simply, as Adria Bonillas (’17) puts it, “It’s time to uplift the next generation of law students.”
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