By Lindsay Estep ’12
While the buzz of activity created by move-in day can be welcoming to some, the experience can be daunting to those arriving from less traditional circumstances. Move-in day represents a big unknown for students who have aged out of the foster care system, are emancipated or are the first in their family to attend college.
Scholarships provide valuable resources for a student’s education, but financial gaps remain. What if there is no money for a laptop, textbooks, bedding and all that is required for the residential college experience?
Joe ’96 and Stephanie Kratochvil Welsh ’95 recognized this inequity and decided to do something about it. Established in 2020, the Joseph and Stephanie Welsh Family Scholarship Fund assists foster and first-generation students in achieving their dream of a college education by funding non-tuition college expenses. This scholarship is the first of its kind at Linfield.
Stephanie said they wanted students to know that “people see you and understand that you’re not starting from the same place that everyone else is, and here is the support to try to get you there.”
The Welshes started talking about helping teenagers when they came across statistics about those that age out of the foster care system.
The National Foster Youth Initiative reports that, nationally, less than 3% of youth raised in foster care graduate from a four-year college. In Oregon, while roughly 25% of former foster youth pursue a college education, only one in 10 will complete a degree, according to the Oregon Foster Youth Connection.
Joe and Stephanie discussed becoming foster parents or adopting, but their careers brought two moves to Asia over the course of ten years. After having three children and determining they were not able to foster minors themselves, they brainstormed other ways to provide meaningful support to foster youth.
That search led them back to their alma mater.
“Linfield was a known entity for us, and we have this passion around trying to help foster kids,” Stephanie said. “It was a lucky confluence of conversations that we were having, Linfield talking about the first-generation program and us putting those two things together.”
The Welshes felt like the time was now for giving.
“We’re young enough in our careers that we have many years of earning potential left,” Stephanie said. “We can make a bit of a sacrifice and start benefiting students now instead of when we’re 70, retired and trying to figure out what we’re going to do with our money.”
The financial sacrifice was minimized thanks to some creativity. The Welshes leveraged a key asset available to them —matching gifts from their employer, Intel. The company doubled their donation, allowing the couple to create an endowment, meaning that this new fund will live in perpetuity and benefit students for generations to come.
“You don’t have to be a millionaire to make a difference,” Joe said. “We’re hoping that other alumni will think about how they want to do giving, the experience they had at Linfield and how lucky a lot of us are. We encourage them to connect all of those dots and do something similar if they feel called to.”
Because, the Welshes believe, it’s not just the academic experience at Linfield that benefits students.
“Linfield is a very special place,” Stephanie said. “You get an excellent education, but you also get a network of people that are supportive, positive and interested in helping other alumni be successful. And that might be an even bigger part of changing people’s lives.”
