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As more than 250 former Hauser graduates gathered for the annual Alumni Banquet at the Hauser gym Saturday evening May 17, there was more than just good food and great company to be had.

“Things went great, I think,” says Adam Miller, VP of Fund Development with the Hawcreek-Flat Rock Area Endowment. “I think it surpassed expectations with how smoothly the dinner went.”

Miller says since the inaugural year of the Endowment’s partnership with the Hauser Hope Clifford Alumni Association in 2024, attendance numbers for the annual event have returned to what they were pre-pandemic.  

And there was even more great news on Saturday evening’s itinerary.   

The Hawcreek-Flat Rock Area Endowment has announced its merger with the Hauser Dollars for Scholars program.

In recent years, the search for new leadership for the scholarship program has been ongoing.

Earlier this spring, the Endowment approached the Scholars program with a proposition that would allow the program to continue, just in a slightly different form.

“We approached them with this idea where anyone who wants to continue from the Dollars for Scholars current board, we can create a subcommittee with our board and their board to start doing scholarships under our umbrella,” Miller explains.

The caveat being that the program can no longer carry the Dollars for Scholars name due to a pre-existing termination clause preventing its adoption.

“So, we’ve rebranded it,” Miller says. “And established a new fund called the Hawcreek Flatrock Endowment Scholarship Fund.”

That means under the Flatrock Endowment advisory board there’s a general fund people can donate to that benefits the grant projects to nonprofits or the scholarship fund that will directly go to benefit Hauser graduates or past graduates, he says.

“We are trying to keep the idea that this is one endowment effort with two variants of nonprofit or student impacts,” Miller says.

In situations where individuals have no preference, the Endowment has the opportunity to take those donations and do a 50/50 split so both funds can grow, Miller further adds.

There’s hopefully going to be a seven-person subcommittee to lead the scholarship efforts once a year, he says.

The Endowment has been truly blessed with a large amount of people who are heavily involved in giving and donating, Miller says.

Now, it’s a matter of figuring out how to grow the scholarship fund in the same way the Endowment has grown its own general fund.

“In 2015, we were granted half of the John Cox Estate, which put us into a $400,000 range of a fund and our endowment now is more than $1.2 million in endowment funds,” Miller says. “What that means for us is that over $50,000 every year to give back to the nonprofits in the Hawcreek and Flatrock townships.”

The Endowment reached the $1 million mark in 2020 after 16 years of its existence as a fund, he further explains.

Miller says he wants to take the scholarship fund to that $1 milliion mark somewhere in the next five to ten years. That translates to $50,000 plus that goes back to Hauser students, graduates and past graduates.

In addition to expected changes to the scholarship program's requirements and deadline, there’s another benefit to the merger.

“We looked at this as a way to piggyback with the Heritage Fund Scholarship that puts students in the running for 90 scholarship chances,” Miller says.

The Endowment’s scholarship application process will dovetail with the Heritage Fund’s scholarship opportunity combining to offer Hauser students the opportunity for even more assistance.

“Hauser students will get their opportunity for a scholarship from us, but it puts them in the running for those many more chances of receiving scholarship funds from the Heritage Fund,” Miller says. “It’s a win/win and gives the students a one-stop shop for scholarship deadlines.”