By CYNDI GRAHAM
Moapa Valley Progress
The Moapa Valley Education Foundation (MVEF) has just completed its first full year of operation, and it has already experienced significant success. The Foundation was founded last year with the goal of making it easier for people to donate money for scholarships to local MVHS graduates and of keeping those donations local.
Founded by charter board members Lindsay Dalley, Lance and Connie Robertson, Dr. Larry Moses, Evan James and Robin and Geniel Ozaki, the MVEF also aims to preserve a greater sense of community and enhance educational opportunities for all the students at Moapa Valley schools. Founding board members saw a need to provide a place for locals to make donations to scholarships for the Moapa Valley High School seniors and other educational purposes.
“A few years ago the school district handled the scholarships,” said Lindsey Dalley, the board president. “Donors would write out a check to the high school and it would be placed into a scholarship fund. Then the school would write the check to whoever received that scholarship,” Dalley said. “This recently was put to an end when the Clark County School District got concerned that tax laws were going to interfere in the process.”
CCSD suggested that the scholarships be run through the Clark County Education Foundation in Las Vegas. But local donors expressed concerns with this. They wanted to make sure that their donations would be certain to go to local students only.
“The Las Vegas foundation would be dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars in scholarships and we did not want our local donations to get lost in that,” Dalley explained.
That’s when a few education advocates in the community got together and started the MVEF as a conduit non-profit for local education donations.
“We were already struggling to maintain our school identity,” Dalley said. “We needed to form our own foundation to keep the money here in the valley. It was important to the local donors that their donations stay local.”
The board saw many benefits of a local education foundation. For example, if individuals have questions about their donation they can ask real questions to people in the community, Dalley said. In addition, the foundation is set up as a 501c3 so any donation made is tax-deductible. The MVEF is easy to find online. The foundation keeps an active Facebook page found by searching its name; also there is a website at moapavalleyfoundation.org.
In addition to monitoring scholarships, the MVEF board members will actively be looking for educational grants to enhance local education. They plan to do this by working with businesses, alumni and community partners to raise funds for the grants.
The easiest way to make a donation towards MVHS scholarships or to educational grants is found on the MVEF website by clicking the donate button.
