A system for every student.
We help students and families make good decisions about college, scholarships, and the years that lead up to both. The work is to help a student build a real foundation, so that by the time they apply, they are a candidate worth funding.
Why “Foundation Scholarship”
Our name comes from the older meaning of the word scholarship, which is devotion to learning. A foundation in scholarship is what we build first in every student. That means the courses, the activities, the community service, and the real pursuit of something they care about.
Money is one of the things that this foundation brings. Scholarships, honors programs, institutional merit aid, research fellowships, and grants are all ways a student’s education gets funded. We named the company for the foundation because the foundation is what we actually build, and it keeps paying off long after the tuition bills are paid.
Build the foundation. The scholarships are the fruit of the labor.
Strong outcomes take time. Understanding the process, knowing what colleges and funders are looking for, and preparing steadily will beat shortcuts and last-minute strategies every time.
Kim Ewing, M.S., M.S.W.
Kim is co-founder of Foundation Scholarship and an education and advocacy consultant. She spent her career inside schools. She has worked as a school psychologist, a vice principal, a principal, and a special education director. In all of those roles, her job was to sit with families who were facing a hard decision about a child and help them make it.
She did the same work at home. Over many years, she guided her own students through course planning, activities, and scholarship preparation, and she built each plan around who that student actually was.
When she sits down with your family, she is doing the work she did throughout her career in the public school system, this time for your student.
Kelsey Ewing, M.S.
Kelsey is co-founder of Foundation Scholarship and an education and advocacy consultant. She leads student coaching, essay review, and the CaT for Girls computing program. She was never a one-interest student. At Buchanan High School, class of 2018, she came through the Energy Academy and competed with the Buchanan Bird Brains, the team that won the FIRST Robotics World Championship in 2015. She served as President of the National Honor Society and finished high school with 3,000+ hours of community service.
Her work for girls in computing started early. As a junior, she won the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) Award for Aspirations in Computing at the state level. As a senior, she won it at the state and national level. Then she applied for an NCWIT grant and won that too. She used the money to build the first Computing and Technology (CaT) program for girls in grades 7 through 11 and taught it during her senior year, with students from Alta Sierra Intermediate and Buchanan High School. She built it because women are underrepresented in computer science and computer engineering, and she wanted that to change.
When she got to Fresno State, no existing degree matched her interests, so she worked with the university to create one: a special major in Cybersecurity and Information Systems in the Lyles College of Engineering. She completed it through the college’s honors program, fully funded. Along the way she served as President of her campus student chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and Vice President of her campus student chapter of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE). She went on to earn an M.S. in Cybersecurity and now works in network operations for the State of California. She earned 40+ scholarships worth about $235,000, most of them during her senior year of high school and many more once she was in college, including industry awards from Raytheon, (ISC)², SWSIS, KnowBe4, and ESET. Scholarships are open to more than high school seniors, and her record proves it. Thanks to merit scholarships, she graduated debt-free.
When she reads your student’s essay or teaches a CaT class, she is teaching the same system she lived.
Start with a Strategy Review
Before we build a plan, we find out where your student actually stands. The Scholarship Readiness & Strategy Review is $495. It includes one session with your family on Zoom, a written four-pillar diagnostic, and a plan for the year ahead. It comes with a 7-day money-back guarantee.
Different students. Different needs. One system.
The system works because it adapts to the student instead of forcing the student into a mold. Each of our own students needed something different from it.
Kelsey: many passions, one story
Kelsey cared about a lot of things at once: robotics, teaching, leadership, cybersecurity, engineering, and getting more girls into technology. A student with that much range is usually told to pick one thing and drop the rest. She never had to.
The work was to connect what she was already doing into a single story instead of a list of unrelated hobbies. Once the robotics, the teaching, the service, and the computing all pointed in the same direction, funders responded to the whole person rather than to any one line on the résumé. That is where most of her scholarships came from. It is also why a university agreed to build her a degree that did not exist yet.
If your student is interested in everything, her path shows that the answer is rarely to make them choose.
Alexander: one passion, deep roots
Alexander went the other direction. He had one consuming interest in science, and he spent years going deeper into it. He was working in a research lab at sixteen. By the time he graduated from high school, his depth was the kind doctoral programs compete to fund. His bachelor’s degree was fully funded through the Smittcamp Family Honors College. He completed 2,500+ hours of community service, published cancer research, and is finishing a fully funded Ph.D. at Baylor College of Medicine. His education has been funded at $422,500+. If your student has one deep interest, his path shows where the money comes from: honors colleges, research programs, and funded graduate study.
Nathalie: first in her family, first in her class
Nathalie was the first person in her family to go to college. She graduated from Hanford High School as valedictorian and was chosen to give the keynote speech at graduation. She opened in English, then welcomed the Spanish speakers in the audience in their own language, and the crowd erupted. She is a quiet powerhouse. The substance was already there. What she needed was a roadmap through a process no one at home had been through. Our coaching helped her see what her record added up to, so she could say it in her own voice. The funding followed, all the way to the NIH. Her bachelor’s degree was fully funded through the Smittcamp Family Honors College. She published research in colorectal cancer genomics and earned an NIH F31 fellowship two years in a row. She is finishing a fully funded Ph.D. at Baylor College of Medicine. Her education has been funded at $451,500+. If your student has done the work but cannot talk about it yet, her path shows what changes when someone helps her find the words.
Your student is none of them, and that is the point. Every Strategy Review starts by figuring out who your student actually is.
Who we work with
Our families have a lot in common. They expect their child to go to college. They already invest in their child’s development. They can pay for a good portion of college, but they see no reason to pay full price when merit aid is available. Many of them earn too much to qualify for meaningful need-based aid, so merit scholarships, honors programs, and institutional awards are the strategy that matters. What they want is simple: someone who knows how this works to look at their child’s situation and tell them what to do. That is what we do. We start in the intermediate grades, while there is still time to build, and we stay with families through senior year.
Interested in learning more?
If you want to talk through next steps, or find out whether our approach is a fit for your family, we would like to hear from you.
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