Chatfield College Student Receives Charlotte R. Schmidlapp Fund Scholarship

Angel Bush, a Walnut Hills resident and student at Chatfield College in Over-the-Rhine, was recently recognized at the YWCA Career Women of Achievement Celebration and named recipient of the 2016 Charlotte R. Schmidlapp Fund Scholarship.

As a 24-year old single mother, Angel is not only facing the economic challenges of returning to school as a single parent, she is also struggling with the financial responsibility of paying for her mother’s funeral expenses after her death from breast cancer.

Raised by a single mother herself, Angel says that she has always believed in the value of education.

“When I was young, I always worked hard to get good grades because I wanted to make my Mom proud, and I wanted to be the first person in my family to graduate from High School,” she said.  Soon after graduating from Woodrow International High School, she gave birth to her son, Aiden, and then discovered that her mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer.

When her mother died, she and her sister made a commitment to pay for the funeral.  Making those payments has been difficult, says Angel, especially when there are so many other bills to pay.

Angel sought help from the YWCA’s Every Child Succeeds Education and Literacy Program, and now, she says that having the resources from the Charlotte R. Schmidlapp Fund Scholarship is a blessing, and helps give her the motivation to fight forward.

“This scholarship means the world to me,” she said.  “It gives me hope and that gives my son hope.  That’s all I ever wanted to do is to show my son that if Mommy can to it, he can do it to.”

“After I graduate from college, of course I want to go out into the work force, but I also want to start a Foundation.  The Joan Bush Foundation, after my mother – a breast cancer fighter.”  This foundation, she says, will be dedicated to helping breast cancer patients and their families pursue healthier lifestyles.

The Charlotte R. Schmidlapp Fund was created to ennoble, empower and uplift young girls and women. Jacob Godfrey Schmidlapp created the fund to memorialize his daughter, who was killed at the age of nineteen in an automobile accident while touring France. He wanted other women to have the same opportunities in life that he would have afforded for Charlotte. What started as a $250,000 fund has grown to almost $30 million in assets. It began by awarding interest-free loans to aid young women in pursuit of higher education. In 1919, the fund gifted its first award to a not-for-profit organization, the YWCA.  In 2008, the Charlotte Schmidlapp Fund Scholarship was created to provide financial support to women who are participating in YWCA programs to complete their educations in order to secure employment and financial stability and achieve independence and self-sufficiency.

Chatfield College is a private, Catholic, liberal arts college offering the Associate of Arts degree in St. Martin and Cincinnati, OH, and is an open enrollment college accredited by the Higher Learning Commission. Chatfield’s open enrollment policy means that prospective students need only have a High School Diploma or GED to attend Chatfield and will be guided individually through the enrollment and Financial Aid application process.  Chatfield’s accreditation by the Higher Learning Commission allows credits earned at Chatfield to easily transfer to four-year colleges.  The Over-the-Rhine campus is located at 1544 Central Parkway.

 

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