Somewhere, a student is sitting in a college library reading a short biography printed on a laminated card — the name of a person they never met, a stranger whose family decided to turn loss into opportunity. The person in that biography had a career, a laugh, a way of making people feel seen. They're gone now. But because someone who loved them decided to do something with all that grief, a young person's path through the world is a little different than it would have been.
That's what a memorial scholarship does. It takes the most formless, unmanageable thing — the love you still have for someone who is no longer here to receive it — and gives it a shape. A direction. A recipient. Every year, in a very real sense, your person changes the trajectory of someone else's life.
For many families, a scholarship fund is the answer to a grief impulse that doesn't have an obvious outlet: the need to do something. Not just to remember, but to act. Not just to donate once and move on, but to build something renewable — something that keeps going. It transforms loss into legacy. It answers the question what do I do with all this love? with something concrete, annual, and lasting.
This guide walks through every step: defining what the scholarship is for, choosing how it's managed and funded, reaching the right applicants, and building the kind of living tribute that continues to carry your loved one's name into futures they never saw. We'll cover real cost ranges, platform options, and practical timelines — so you can take action rather than just intend to.
If you're exploring other ways to channel grief into giving, our guide to donating in memory of a loved one covers one-time and ongoing options, and our piece on legacy letters explores another form of leaving something lasting behind.
Why a Scholarship Is One of the Most Lasting Forms of Tribute
It Embodies the Person's Values, Not Just Their Memory
A scholarship isn't just a named award. It's a statement about who this person was and what they believed in. A scholarship for first-generation college students says something about a parent who never got to go. A scholarship for student musicians says something about a child who filled every room with sound. An award for students overcoming adversity says something about a person who knew what that looked like from the inside.
Every student who receives the award is, in some way, connected to those values. They don't just benefit financially — they become part of a story that started with someone else's life and loss. Over time, as recipients accumulate, a small community forms around the person's name. A community of people whose lives were touched by someone they never had the chance to meet.
It Grows Over Time
Unlike a one-time memorial donation, a scholarship has the capacity to compound. With recurring family contributions, annual fundraising, or an endowment structure, the award can grow — supporting more students, larger amounts, or additional categories over the years. What starts as a $500 annual award can become a $2,500 award a decade later.
Endowed scholarships at universities typically require a minimum gift of $25,000 to $100,000 to generate enough annual return to fund the award. But platform-managed and non-endowed scholarships can begin with as little as $500, making this genuinely accessible from the first year of grief.
How It Differs From a Memorial Donation
A memorial donation is a meaningful act — you give once, to an existing organization, in someone's name. A named scholarship is different. It creates a dedicated, recurring tribute that belongs to your person. Their name is on it. The criteria reflect their life. The recipients, now and for years to come, will know who they are and why.
Many families start with a donation and eventually build toward a scholarship. Both have their place. Our piece on memorial donations can help you think through how the two approaches compare.
Step 1: Defining the Purpose and Criteria for Your Scholarship
Who Should Receive This Award?
Start here: not with logistics, but with the person. What did they care about? What were their passions, their struggles, their beliefs about what the world needed more of? What kind of student would they have rooted for?
Common criteria models include academic merit, financial need, a specific field of study, community service, a personal essay, or the experience of overcoming adversity. Many scholarships combine two or three of these. There's no single right answer — the right answer is the one that feels most true to who they were.
A note on specificity: narrower criteria often feel more personal and meaningful, but they also reduce the pool of eligible applicants. A scholarship for left-handed students pursuing marine biology degrees from Montana might feel deeply specific — and might receive no applications. Balance personal resonance with practical reach.
Setting the Award Amount
A scholarship doesn't have to be large to be meaningful. A $500 annual award is not a small thing to a student choosing between textbooks and groceries. It doesn't need to cover full tuition to honor someone. It needs to be consistent, reliable, and real.
Common ranges for family-managed scholarships run from $500 to $5,000 annually. University-partnered scholarships often start at $1,000 to $2,500. Match your award amount to your funding model — don't commit to an amount you can't sustain year after year.
What Level of Education Will You Support?
Your options are broader than they might seem. High school seniors heading to four-year colleges are the most common recipients, but college students, graduate students, vocational and trade program students, and community college students are all viable choices. Trade and vocational scholarships are increasingly popular — they're less competitive to administer and can have enormous practical impact on recipients' lives.
If your person worked with their hands, valued a trade, or believed in practical skill over credential accumulation, a vocational scholarship might be the most honest expression of who they were.
Step 2: Choosing How to Manage and Administer the Scholarship
Platform-Managed Scholarships: The Easiest Starting Point
For families who want a manageable, low-administrative-burden path, online scholarship platforms are the most accessible option. Platforms like Bold.org, Scholarship America, Going Merry, and ScholarshipOwl handle application collection, essay review tools, student visibility, and disbursement.
Bold.org allows families to create a scholarship beginning with no setup fee, though the platform takes a fee on donations. Scholarship America charges administrative fees typically in the range of 10 to 15 percent of the scholarship amount. These costs buy you professionalism, reach, and infrastructure you'd otherwise have to build yourself.
This is the best starting point for most families — particularly in the first year, when energy is limited and the emotional work of establishing the scholarship is already significant.
University or School-Partnered Scholarships
Many universities, community colleges, and high schools will administer named scholarships on behalf of families — collecting applications, managing selection, and handling disbursement — in exchange for a gift that meets their minimum threshold.
Endowed scholarships at universities generally require $10,000 to $100,000 to generate annual returns sufficient for an award. But many institutions have non-endowed annual scholarship programs that begin at $1,000 to $5,000 per year. Contact the institution's development or foundation office — most have a clear, established process for this. If your person was a graduate of a particular school, starting there feels especially right.
Community Foundation-Managed Scholarships
Every major metro area — and most mid-sized cities — has a community foundation. These are nonprofit organizations that hold and invest funds for a wide range of community purposes, including scholarship funds managed on behalf of families.
Contributions to a community foundation-managed scholarship are typically tax-deductible. The foundation handles professional administration and can give your scholarship a wider reach within the local community. Minimum fund levels vary by foundation but typically start at $10,000 to $25,000 to establish a named fund.
Community foundations are a particularly strong option when your person had deep local ties — when the scholarship is meant to belong to a specific place, not just a platform or institution.
Self-Managed Scholarships
Families can manage their own scholarship entirely — a dedicated bank account, a formal application process, a selection committee, and direct payment to recipients. This requires the most administrative work but gives complete control over every element.
If you go this route, consult a CPA about the tax implications. Depending on the structure, contributions may or may not be tax-deductible, and disbursement needs to be handled carefully to avoid issues. Self-managed scholarships work well for small, locally targeted awards — a scholarship for graduates of a specific high school, for example, selected by a committee of people who knew your person.
Step 3: Raising and Sustaining the Scholarship Fund
Starting Contributions — Family, Friends, and the Memorial Itself
Many families launch a scholarship fund at the time of death and include it directly in the obituary: "In lieu of flowers, contributions to the [Name] Scholarship Fund may be made at [link]." This framing is one of the most effective ways to generate initial funding — it gives people something specific and purposeful to do with the impulse to help, and it converts the immediate wave of sympathy into a financial foundation for the scholarship.
Even a modest initial fund — $2,000 to $5,000 from the first year of contributions — is enough to launch the first award and establish the scholarship as real.
Annual Fundraising — Keeping It Alive
The first year is often the easiest to fund. The challenge is year three, year five, year ten. Building a sustainable fundraising rhythm early is essential.
Ideas that work: an annual event in the person's memory (a golf tournament, a 5K, a dinner); a recurring social media campaign on their birthday or on the anniversary of their death; an annual email to family and friends explaining the scholarship and its recipients. The scholarship's continued visibility keeps the person's name alive in a public, purposeful way — and gives the community around them a way to stay connected to that purpose.
Corporate Matching and Employer Programs
If your scholarship is managed through a qualified 501(c)(3) organization — including platforms like Bold.org, Scholarship America, or a community foundation — contributions to the fund are typically tax-deductible, and many employers offer charitable matching programs. A $500 gift from a family friend could become $1,000 with a matching employer. Encourage donors to check with their HR departments.
Long-Term Endowment Goals
For families committed to a permanent legacy, an endowment model allows the scholarship to become self-sustaining. The principal is invested; the scholarship is funded from annual returns rather than new contributions.
A simple example: a $50,000 endowment at a 5 percent annual return funds a $2,500 scholarship in perpetuity — every year, indefinitely, without requiring additional fundraising. According to NACUBO data, university endowments have averaged approximately 5.7 percent annual returns over the past decade. The endowment threshold feels distant for most families in the first years, but it's a meaningful long-term goal that can be built toward steadily.
Step 4: Reaching the Right Applicants
Choosing Visibility Channels
A scholarship nobody knows about doesn't help anyone. Once your scholarship is established, actively promote it through the channels most likely to reach eligible students.
Effective channels include school and university financial aid offices, guidance counselors, departmental bulletin boards, community Facebook groups and Nextdoor pages, and the websites of relevant organizations in the field your scholarship supports. If you're managing through a platform like Bold.org, the scholarship is automatically searchable by registered students — that built-in visibility is one of the strongest arguments for platform management in the early years.
Writing a Scholarship Description That Honors the Person
The scholarship description is itself a tribute. It's often the first thing a recipient knows about your person, and it may be the thing they remember longest. Don't make it generic.
Include a brief, human biography of the honoree — not a resume, but a portrait. Why was this award created? What qualities or experiences does the selection committee hope to recognize? What did this person believe about education, opportunity, or the field the scholarship supports?
Example language that works: "Maria Chen was a first-generation college graduate who spent her career in public health and believed that education was the most powerful equalizer in the world. This scholarship was created by her family in 2024 to support students who share her drive, her curiosity, and her belief in what's possible — particularly students from underserved communities who are pursuing careers in healthcare."
That description tells a student who they're receiving this award on behalf of. That matters.
Annual Selection as Annual Remembrance
Consider reframing the selection process itself — reading through applications, discussing candidates, choosing a recipient — as an annual act of grief and tribute. Many families find this process unexpectedly healing. You're reading the stories of young people who, in some way, resemble the person you lost, or who represent a need they would have wanted to meet.
Some families schedule the selection process on the person's birthday or on the anniversary of their death, making it a formal part of annual remembrance. Our piece on navigating grief anniversaries has more on building these kinds of meaningful annual rituals.
How to Keep the Scholarship Meaningful Year After Year
Connecting Recipients to the Person's Story
One of the quieter gifts a scholarship can give is a real connection between a recipient and a life they never got to witness. When you notify a scholarship winner, consider sending them more than a check. Send a brief biography, a photo, a letter from the family about who this person was and why they would have cheered for this student.
Some families stay in touch with past recipients over the years. An unexpected community forms — people whose lives were genuinely shaped by someone they never knew. For a grieving family, hearing from a recipient years later — about the path their life has taken, the work they're doing, the person they've become — is one of the most profound forms of comfort available.
Incorporating the Scholarship Into Family Tribute Rituals
Announce the annual winner at a family gathering, or on the person's birthday. Make the scholarship part of the annual rhythm of how the family honors their person — not just a financial mechanism, but a living tribute that gets marked and celebrated.
Pair the announcement with other tribute practices: marking grief anniversaries intentionally, reviewing the recipient's essay as a family, or writing a brief letter to the winner together.
Pairing the Scholarship With Other Legacy Tools
A memorial scholarship works best as part of a broader legacy ecosystem. A legacy letter can explain the scholarship's meaning to future generations of your own family. A memory box can include the first recipient's thank-you note alongside your person's own mementos — creating a physical record of the legacy they built. And a tribute book can tell the story of who they were, preserved in a form that can be shared with every recipient who comes after.
A scholarship, at its best, doesn't live in isolation. It's one strand of a larger web of remembrance — one way among many of keeping a person's name and values active in the world.
Taking the First Step
The first step is always the hardest. It can feel overwhelming to translate grief into logistics — to sit down with a spreadsheet or a website when you're still in the thick of it.
You don't have to do everything at once. You can start by writing a one-paragraph description of who your person was and what they cared about. You can explore one platform — Bold.org takes fifteen minutes to set up a basic scholarship page. You can send one email to one school's financial aid office.
The scholarship doesn't have to be perfect to be real. It just has to exist. And once it does, it will carry your person's name forward in ways you can't yet fully imagine — into lives and futures they never got to see.
Sources
Bold.org. "How to Create a Scholarship." Bold.org, 2024. bold.org/scholarship-providers/create-a-scholarship
Scholarship America. "How to Create a Named Scholarship." Scholarship America, 2024. scholarshipamerica.org/scholarship-donors
National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO). "2023 NACUBO-TIAA Study of Endowments." NACUBO, 2024. nacubo.org/Research/2024/NACUBO-TIAA-Study-of-Endowments
Council on Foundations. "Scholarship Funds: Guidelines for Donors." Council on Foundations, 2023. cof.org/content/scholarship-funds
Internal Revenue Service. "Publication 526: Charitable Contributions." IRS, 2024. irs.gov/publications/p526
National Scholarship Providers Association. "Best Practices for Scholarship Administration." NSPA, 2023. scholarshipproviders.org/resources