NEWS

Scholarship Awarded to Pomona Women's Center Staff Member

Garett Staley is headed to USC in the fall for a Master's Degree in Social Work. She was honored to be among the 65 college seniors who were awarded the prestigious Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Graduate Scholarship. Only five percent of the applicant pool was awarded the scholarship, which pays up to $50,000 per student per year of study. Each award covers a portion of educational expenses, including tuition, living expenses, required fees, and books for the graduate degree chosen.

Staley works at PROTOTYPES, one of the nation's leading multi-service, non-profit agencies that help homeless women and their children who are dealing with complex problems. The funding is provided by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Association. "Ms. Staley has overwhelmingly proven that education stands as perhaps the greatest mechanism by which at-risk and marginalized groups may pull themselves out of crises," Pitzer College's Dean of Faculty Alan Jones said.

Of her education at Pitzer Staley said, "I feel completely prepared for graduate school. Professor Stromberg was an amazing qualitative teacher-very organized and she made us be organized. Qualitative was probably my favorite class; I saw sociology at work in real life and have now found a lifetime's worth of things I could do further study on."

The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation is a private, independent foundation established in 2000 through the will of Jack Kent Cooke. When he died on April 6, 1997, Mr. Cooke left most of his fortune to establish the Foundation.

--Susan Andrews (Pitzer College website, http://www.pitzer.edu)