Well, there’s nothing like close brush with one’s mortality to remind that it’s time to start letting loose of the purse strings.

Meda retired from the University of Hawaii in 2020 after a startling 50 years on the university payroll, starting when she was still a grad student and continuing through her years teaching at Honolulu Community College and on to the Manoa Campus. At that time, we followed my mother’s lead and created an endowed scholarship fund in College of Social Sciences by initially contributing just enough to establish the fund, which provides scholarships to students in the UH Women’s Studies Program. We’ve added to it modestly over the past several years, with the plan that it will eventually be boosted with a larger infusion of cash from our estates.

Using funds my mother inherited as a beneficiary of the estate of George Galbraith, she had previously established two different scholarship funds to benefit University of Hawaii community college students, one in her name and one in her mother’s name.

And we are just wrapping up the process of setting up the Chesney Lind Scholarship Endowment at Whitman College, where we both graduated in the Class of ’69. This will be the first scholarship intended to benefit Whitman students from Hawaii. We took advantage of an offer of matching funds to establish an endowment they expect to generate nearly $10,000 a year for scholarship aid.

Now we’ll take a breath and hope these scholarships will make a difference in the lives of future students at both institutions!