Former Madison students reflect on FATE Foundation's impact 10 years and counting

SPRING CREEK - Spring Creek residents Mike and Anna Tuziw never imagined the scholarship foundation they started would grow into what it is now: a financial lifeline for many Madison County students and families.

This year marks the FATE (Future Achievements Through Education) Foundation's 10-year anniversary.

According to Mike Tuziw, the first scholarship being awarded in 2014.

The organization was started by the couple to honor their parents after the couple moved from Kansas City in 2011.

"We would not be where we're at and have what we have if they did not make the sacrifices they did," Mike Tuziw said. "So, we thought the best way to do that would be to start a scholarship. Our parents firmly believed that education was the pathway out of poverty and the road to prosperity.

"They made sure that us and all our siblings - all their kids - had an opportunity to go to college. They were all born in the early 1930s, and Anna's dad actually in the late 1920s, so they grew up through troubling times during the war and everything - mine in Europe and hers in Kansas during the Dust Bowl days. So, they made sure that we all had that opportunity to not have to go through what they did. So we said the best way to do this is to do a scholarship in their honor."

According to Mike Tuziw, when the couple first founded the organization, they expected it to be a small-time operation.

"We started our first year just us, and we thought when we did this that this was just going to be Anna and I, and we'd start it at $500 and we'd slowly work it up and get it to $1,000, maybe $2,000 and we'd just do that and that would be it. We found out in the second year, we had a family friend visiting and read through all the stuff we had and said, 'I want to do one of these. I want to pick one of the winners and write you a check for their scholarship.

"So we said, 'Well, maybe we should start telling people, what we're doing. And we did, and people were interested. But we didn't have a 501(c)(3). No one knew who we were. It was just these strange people living on the far side of the county that no one's heard of with a strange name and everything, and it was like, 'Well, where are they from?'"

Anna Tuziw's mother was a registered nurse, and her dad was a county road supervisor.

"My dad dropped out of school when he was in eighth grade because he had to help take care of his family. He came from a family that had eight brothers and sisters," Anna Tuziw said. "His dad passed away when he was 12. So dad dropped out of school. He was a brilliant engineer but he never got to go to engineering school because he had to drop out. He could make anything and do anything."

Anna Tuziw grew up in Tribune, Kansas, the county seat of Greeley County, which borders Colorado. As of the 2020 census, there were 772 residents in Tribune.

"There's nothing there," Anna Tuziw said. "My mother knew that, and she said, 'There's no future for you there. You need to do something.'"

Before FATE, Mike Tuziw worked as an air traffic controller for 23 years. Anna Tuziw taught English for two years in western Kansas before transitioning to the business world, where she worked for IBM for more than 30 years before retiring in 2019.

In 2022, through the participation of others, FATE Foundation awarded four students with scholarships totaling $46,000. The FATE Scholar Award is not need based – and, while the Tuziws do take other things into consideration – the primary focus is on student participation in school, leadership and community service.

According to Mike Tuziw, when the organization started, it issued one-year scholarships to students, but decided to expand to four-year scholarships after a Madison County scholarship winner could not continue his studies due to financial troubles within his family, whose farm went under.

According to the Tuziws, the first four-year scholarship winner was Megan Powell.

"She said that knowing that she had those next years money started already, she didn't have to work that freshman year working two to three jobs, so she could concentrate more on her studies," Mike Tuziw said.

Powell earned her degree from Appalachian State on summa cum laude honors.

Jennifer Bryson has worked 28 years in Madison County Schools, and has served as a school counselor at Madison Early College High School since 2009.

"FATE Foundation has had a very important impact on families in Madison County," Bryson said. "This foundation provides important financial support to help students further their education in four-year colleges/universities. Without FATE, some of the life changing experience of receiving a four-year college degree would be impossible for some of the students I have seen served through their scholarship program."

Hearing from the students

Ava Clark was awarded a FATE Scholar Award as a Madison Early College High School senior in 2021.

Clark is currently enrolled at UNC Chapel Hill and is studying veterinary science.

"I've gotten a lot of internship opportunities through Mike and Anna, and it's just kind of relieved a lot of the financial burden that the school has put on me, because it's a little expensive to go here," Clark said. "It's definitely been helpful and opened up a lot of opportunities for me at this school. It's a good school. So, I'm very lucky to be here."

Clark said if she didn't receive the scholarship award, she's not sure she would have been able to attend UNC Chapel Hill, which is consistently ranked as one of the best public colleges nationally.

"With college expenses rising every year, some families just cannot make the dream of a four-year college education come true for their child without additional financial support," Bryson said. "Families are not qualifying to receive as much through FAFSA as in the past so this scholarship program helps students who might otherwise fall through the cracks. With this scholarship being only for Madison County students, it gives our students who are from a more rural, underserved area, the chance to compete only against their peers for these awards, instead of competing against the entire state and nation for other scholarships."

Bryson recalled another MECHS student who received FATE scholarship monies who came back to visit Bryson after her first year in college.

According to Bryson, this student who comes from a single parent family had received full financial aid and some other smaller scholarship awards but was still several thousand dollars short of what it would cost to attend, despite being at the top of her class academically and with standardized test scores, had participated in athletics, had worked within the school community to provide service to others, and was in many leadership roles at MECHS.

"She was a perfect all around candidate for many other scholarships, but she found herself in the familiar situation of not winning some of the larger scholarship awards she had applied for," Bryson said. "This student has now graduated top of her class from a very prestigious UNC school and plans to continue her service to others through a career in the medical field.

"I truly believe that wonderful contributions to mankind will come from this remarkable young lady but without the additional financial support she received through her FATE scholarship award, I don't think she would have been able to financially stay in college. When I think of FATE, I think of this wonderful young lady that was impacted so much by their foundation. For me, that's what FATE is all about."

Molly Fisher was a 2020 MECHS FATE Scholar Award winner. She will graduate from UNC Asheville in early May with degrees in English literature and psychology.

"As painfully cliche as this sounds, I used this scholarship money not to make more money but to make sense of what little time I have here on this earth and enjoy what I set out to do instead of living halfway because it was the 'practical' decision," Fisher said. "With financial aid, but more specifically through a community-based foundation like FATE, kids from lower-income towns finally get the chance to say, 'Hmm. Maybe this is possible' instead of 'Not in a million years.' Just that moment of mere consideration is incredibly important, of imagining what it would be like to have your wish fulfilled when you never allowed yourself to picture it before.

"None of us chose our parents, our hometown, our race, our sexual or gender identity coming into this life. It takes recognizing the privileges you’ve been given without any effort on your own to remember that life isn't fair. Use those privileges to try your best and make it so for the kids from under-resourced places like Madison County who dream of being more than what their family or community expects, who want to completely change our value systems and pave a new path for future generations to follow. Because a dream is bigger than any job – it is the conduit for progress."

In Fisher's view, part of what made her experience as a FATE Scholar so rewarding was the community coming together in a 'It takes a village' approach.

"Being awarded a FATE scholarship means that I would never be alone on this academic journey and that there are people cheering me on from the sidelines," Fisher said. "Each rambly update letter I wrote to the sponsors, every lunch with Mike and Anna where we talked for hours about traveling, and all the emails we sent back and forth with pictures from those trips had opened up something entirely unexpected within me – the opportunity to believe in myself as much as they did. So, to me, this award helped me accomplish what I couldn’t have done alone."

Last year, the organization started its STEM Scholarship, which is now its premier scholarship.

"Our goal is to make that a $20,000 scholarship, for $5,000 a year," Tuziw said. "So we're working to get that there. Then, we plan to bring the other scholarships up behind. We have lofty goals maybe five to 10 years from now that where we can have all of them be $20,000 scholarships. It's just going to take a lot more people helping out, though. We never thought we'd get to one $10,000 scholarship. When we did, it was just like, 'Wow. Well let's keep going and see where we can end up."

According to Mike Tuziw, FATE Foundation received donations from roughly 70 people, businesses and organizations.

"So when you see the two of us, you've got to see all these people standing behind us who are taking an interest in the kids and their futures," Mike Tuziw said. "They're wanting to give them something, a chance at life. We like to say, 'Each brain deserves a chance.'"

For more information on the organization, or to become a donor, visit FATE Foundation's website at https://fate.charity/.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Former Madison students tout FATE Foundation's impact in 10th year