Teresa Turner said she remembers watching the donations arrive faster than she could count them.
Turner, the director of student affairs at the Southern Scholarship Foundation in Gainesville, has worked for the scholarship fund for 19 years.
She’s seen underprivileged kids from across Florida go to college because of the foundation’s scholarship funds.
This year, they added 20 scholarships, Turner said.
In order to continue growing, Turner said the foundation started asking for donations in January. The initial goal was to raise $60,000 this year.
When the Southern Scholarship Foundation’s 60th anniversary passed April 13, foundation President Mickey S. Moore increased the fundraising goal to $150,000.
The foundation doesn’t want to just stay afloat, Turner said. It wants to improve on what it built.
Moore said the additional $90,000 would help renovate the 27 scholarship houses that 458 students across six colleges in Florida lived in during the 2014-2015 academic year.
An increasing amount of the foundation’s houses have been deteriorating in recent years, Turner said.
“The balance will be to repair much-needed housing,” Turner said. “A lot of our houses, especially in Tallahassee, are pretty old.”
Turner said when the homes were first built, they didn’t come with a maintenance clause.
That oversight to not add a maintenance clause into the housing contract has cost the foundation thousands of dollars in repairs, she said.
Turner grew up in Gainesville, and she was eager to move back to her hometown with her husband and daughter.
“When they first called me and asked me if I wanted to go, I was jumping for any excuse already,” Turner said. “We love it here.”
The foundation currently helps a number of students in Gainesville pay for college.
One of those students is Joey Briggs, a junior studying at UF.
Briggs receives funds from the foundation and he lives in one of its nine houses in Gainesville.
“I wouldn’t have been able to go to college probably, at least not UF,” Briggs said.
Briggs has kept up with all of the Southern Scholarship Foundation’s requirements, which requires students to maintain a 3.0 GPA and participate in extracurricular activities.
“We have plenty of students from all over that need our help, especially at UF, and unfortunately the houses aren’t the best right now,” Turner said.
Turner said the foundation is planning fundraising events in May and June. She said she hopes one of them is an online auction.
“We haven’t finalized anything,” Turner said, “but right now we are just planning what to do next.”
[A version of this story ran on page 1 on 5/12/15]
