The Houston Community College System Foundation was founded in 1976 to provide scholarships to Houston Community College students and to support the college’s efforts to attract and educate Houston-area students—including many non-traditional students and those facing barriers to higher education.
Like virtually all community college foundations, for most of its existence the HCCS Foundation functioned primarily as a clearinghouse for scholarships, accepting funds from donors and awarding them to eligible students. It was not expected to engage in large-scale solicitation of funds.
Much has changed since the HCCS Foundation’s establishment. Higher education has become a requirement for earning a stable living, and businesses have begun clamoring for a more educated workforce. At the same time, tuition and fees at four-year institutions have skyrocketed, and Houston’s demographics have shifted, with the majority of the city’s young people now coming from backgrounds historically unlikely to receive higher education.
Like community college foundations around the country, the HCCS Foundation recognized the need to expand its role and develop more sophisticated fundraising strategies to support HCC and its students. A new executive director was hired, along with a development team who have begun reaching out to Houston foundations, corporations, and individuals to support student scholarships and selected HCC capital projects throughout the city.
In 2007, the HCCS Foundation launched a website, Houston Community College students can now apply online for all scholarships offered through the HCCS Foundation.
Also in 2007, the HCCS Foundation was reclassified by the Internal Revenue Service as a Section 509(a)(1) and 170(b)(1)(A)(vi) publicly supported charity under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
Famous quotes containing the words houston, community, college, system and/or foundation:
“In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you’re told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.”
—Simon Hoggart (b. 1946)
“I am convinced that our American society will become more and more vulgarized and that it will be fragmentized into contending economic, racial and religious pressure groups lacking in unity and common will, unless we can arrest the disintegration of the family and of community solidarity.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)
“If any proof were needed of the progress of the cause for which I have worked, it is here tonight. The presence on the stage of these college women, and in the audience of all those college girls who will some day be the nation’s greatest strength, will tell their own story to the world.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)
“For us necessity is not as of old an image without us, with whom we can do warfare; it is a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark:M”I wasn’t worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.””
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)