Graduating Seniors who Have Shown Courage and Character to Achieve Success Despite Extreme Obstacles are Eligible for Scholarship Support
WATERTOWN — The Northern New York Community Foundation is pleased to announce a new partnership with the Greenfield Everyday Heroes Foundation and its founders to bring the “Everyday Heroes Award” to Watertown High School.
Beginning with the class of 2022, the Greenfield Everyday Heroes Foundation will recognize and award a graduating senior who has shown the courage and character to achieve success regardless of the extreme obstacles placed in front of them. The Everyday Heroes Award is a $5,000 scholarship. In partnership with the Community Foundation, a $5,000 matching grant will enable an additional award.
The two foundations share common values, and both seek to enhance the communities they serve in supporting students to achieve their dreams of higher education. Since 1995, Greenfield Everyday Heroes Foundation has been supporting graduating high school seniors from select schools in the Northeast. Watertown High School is the first school in New York State to offer the Everyday Heroes Award.
“We have great synergy with the Community Foundation, and our partnership only increases our ability to help a new cohort of inspirational and deserving students. After doing this for 26 years, we’ve seen over and over how empowering it can be for an ‘everyday hero’ to be recognized,” said Anne Uhlein Lantz, Greenfield Everyday Heroes Foundation executive director and Watertown native.
Empowering students at Watertown High School is meaningful to Ms. Lantz because of her family’s ties to Watertown and the region. She has deep multi-generational roots in the city. Ms. Lantz’s grandparents, John Wyatt and Grace Uhlein and Dr. Howard and Katherine Cooper, and parents, Wyatt and Sandy Uhlein, grew up in Watertown.
Despite moving away from Watertown when she was young, Ms. Lantz often returned to Northern New York to spend holidays with family and friends and summers in Chaumont and on the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario, where her parents owned a home on Grenadier Island. Her parents were longtime members of the Crescent Yacht Club, and Anne fondly recalls many adventures with a large, tight-knit group of friends and family. Her mother recently passed away and launching the Greenfield Everyday Heroes Award at Watertown High School is a special way to honor her parents and grandparents while giving back to a community that provided so much for her family.
“This award has the potential to change lives not only by providing financial support but showing our belief in students in a way that can inspire them to reach beyond what they may have imagined possible,” said Rande Richardson, Community Foundation executive director. “By partnering this way, we can maximize a program that makes a transformative difference at a local level.”
The Greenfield Everyday Heroes Award is presented to graduating seniors who have overcome significant barriers and obstacles while achieving success. These barriers and obstacles come in all forms: homelessness, serious physical or mental illness, incarcerated parents, abuse, or other extreme hardships.
The award recognizes and celebrates students who exemplify the triumph of the human spirit over adversity. Each has their own story of how they overcame significant challenges to achieve success. They are role models who also give back to their community. They are going off to college, in many cases the first in their families to do so, with the grit and perseverance it takes to overcome the tough cards they were dealt in life.
The Greenfield Everyday Heroes Foundation and the Community Foundation will work closely with guidance counselors at Watertown High School to accept applications for the award annually. Selected students will receive a $5,000 scholarship to pursue post-secondary education at an accredited two- or four-year college, or a technical, trade or vocational school. The Community Foundation and the Greenfield Everyday Heroes Foundation will also work together to identify students who qualify for the Everyday Heroes Award through the Community Foundation’s 2022-2023 Freshman Scholarship application.
Members of the Watertown High School Class of 2022 may apply for the Greenfield Everyday Heroes Award by Sunday, April 10, 2022. Applications for the award may be found online at everydayheroes.org/apply. Students are also encouraged to apply for other scholarships available through the Community Foundation at nnycf.org/scholarships/applications.
Andy Greenfield started Everyday Heroes in 1995 and has been actively involved with the foundation for the past 27 years. He has spent his career as an entrepreneur, founding and selling several companies in the marketing services industry. In 2009, he founded Thought into Action, Colgate University’s entrepreneurship program. Mr. Greenfield presently serves on the Colgate University Board of Trustees. Since 2014, he has been a General Partner of TIA VENTURES, an early-stage venture capital firm. Mr. Greenfield earned a bachelor’s degree from Colgate University, and a master’s and ABD from Brown University.
Professionally, Ms. Lantz has served as Executive Director of the Greenfield Everyday Heroes Foundation since 1999. She began her career in financial services, founding Prism Group, LLC (financial advisory), and later at Deloitte as a tax advisor and financial planner (CFP). She then joined Greenfield Consulting Group where she served on the senior management team overseeing legal, human resources, and talent acquisition. Ms. Lantz earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Vermont.
About the Northern New York Community Foundation
Since 1929, the Northern New York Community Foundation has invested in improving and enriching the quality of life for all in communities across Jefferson, Lewis, and St. Lawrence counties.
Through partnerships with businesses and organizations, charitable foundations, and generous families and individual donors, the Community Foundation awards grants and scholarships from an endowment and collection of funds that benefit the region. Its commitment to donors helps individuals achieve their charitable objectives now and for generations to come by preserving and honoring legacies of community philanthropy while inspiring others.
The Community Foundation is a resource for local charitable organizations, donors, professional advisors, and nonprofit organizations. It also works to bring people together at its permanent home in the Northern New York Philanthropy Center to discuss challenges our communities face and find creative solutions that strengthen the region and make it a great place to live, work, and play.