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Event Date: April 9, 2014

The spirit of philanthropy is alive and well at KCC! Nearly 200 donors, scholarship recipients and KCC faculty and staff attended this year’s scholarship dinner celebrating the impact of scholarships and the generous donors who invest in student success.  To accommodate the growing demand to participate, we moved this year’s dinner to the ‘Ohia Building Cafeteria.   Lively conversations could be heard throughout the evening as students, donors, and faculty shared experiences and got to know each other better.

The event opened with a 3 minute video highlighting the UH community colleges’ golden anniversary of providing accessible affordable higher education to Hawai‘i for 50 years.  The pre-dinner program also featured speakers Chancellor Leon Richards, Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Louise Pagotto and UH Foundation VP for Development Greg Williams who thanked donors for their highly impactful generosity, and spoke about the critical role scholarships play in the lives of students and their families.

Following dinner, Jackie Hites spoke about her daughter Helen, an outstanding KCC graduate who died in a tragic accident.  While attending KCC, Helen had been given a scholarship created by the Kelley family in memory of their mother Estelle.  Jackie thanked Estelle’s daughter Jean Rolles for their support during Helen’s life.  Then Jackie went on to describe how she had felt compelled to create an endowed scholarship in memory of her daughter to help other students in the future just as the Kelleys had helped her daughter.  Jackie’s story touched all of us by illustrating how spirit can trump tragedy.

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Mahalo to every KCC scholarship donor for helping our students pursue their academic goals and make better lives for themselves and their families.