Beausejour couple’s scholarship helping students who help the community

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While scholarships are often handed out to the students with the highest grades or the greatest athletic abilities, a new scholarship introduced in a rural community will reward students for the work they do to give back to their community.

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“Scholarships are a lot of times focused on academics or sports which is great, but we wanted to make this specifically about community service,” Clinton Orr said. “In my opinion, if they put in the effort anyone can win this.”

Orr and his wife Jodi Ruta are longtime residents of Beausejour, a community home to about 3,500 residents located within the RM of Brokenhead northeast of Winnipeg.

Orr said he and his wife have been active members of the Brokenhead community for years, and were looking for a way to reward youth in the community who take part in community service and volunteer their time to help others.

“We always want to encourage kids to get involved and to give back, and the reasons are two-fold,” Orr said. “It helps to better the community, but it is also important for those who are doing the volunteering.

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“It builds social skills, community skills, and it gives the opportunity to maybe change their perspective and develop some empathy if they are doing things where they might be out of their bubble or comfort zone.”

Orr and Ruta have teamed up with the Brokenhead River Community Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that works to provide financial support to charitable projects in the area, and gifted the foundation more than $200,000, to create the brand new Clinton Orr & Jodi Ruta Community Builder Scholarship Fund.

According to Orr, two scholarships of $4,000 each will be awarded at the end of this school year, and annually after that, to two grade 12 students in the area who have been found to put the most effort into giving back to their community throughout the year.

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He added the foundation will use a point system based on specific criteria that will see the two students who collect the most points throughout the school year win the two scholarships. The system will take into account both community and volunteer hours served, but also the scope of the work being done.

“They will be looking at volunteer hours, and that’s hours that could be volunteered in the school, in the broader community, or in other communities like Winnipeg, but they will also be looking at the type of activities being done,” Orr said.

“So for example, getting a volunteer initiative off the ground could be worth more points than volunteering for an existing organization and they will tally up those points and get a qualitative volunteer score which will be used to award the scholarships.”

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The award will be available to any grade 12 students who attend Ecole Edward Schreyer School, a grade 6-12 school located in Beausejour, and Orr said they will spend the next few weeks getting the word out to students at the school about the new scholarship, and what they need to do to apply for it.

He added this is not a scholarship that only someone with top grades in school can win.

“You need passing grades but you don’t necessarily need all A’s in school to win this scholarship, so it’s really open to anyone who wants to put in the work.”

— Dave Baxter is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter who works out of the Winnipeg Sun. The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.

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