Community Honor Fund

The Community Honor Fund is a student-founded and student-run non-profit in Charlottesville, Virginia that has raised around $20,000 through grants and direct fund-raising since our founding in 2014. Members of the Community Honor Fund include QuestBridge, Jefferson, Rodman, and Echols Scholars who have gone on to work at companies like Bain, Moellis & Company, and McKinsey. We have a diverse set of majors, ranging from concentrations in Finance to sociology, but we’re united in our passion for our clients. The work that we do doesn’t influence our grades, but it does have an impact on people often undergoing extremely difficult times, and we take our work seriously. We routinely put down our homework to attend emergency loan meetings, and when we make commitments to our clients, we stick to them. Potential members of the Community Honor Fund are informed that we ask for a four year commitment to the organization, and this enables us to build and preserve member-client relationships as well as focus on the long term success of both our clients and our organization. So far, we haven’t lost our startup mentality as we’ve scaled from just a few loans made through an initial grant to more than a dozen loans made and repaid through a mixture of personal relationships and partnerships with other organizations. Now, our principal question is how to go from $20,000 to $100,000? We’re exploring community partnerships, new sources of grants, direct fundraising.