Flourish Beaver County aims to raise $22 million to give scholarships to local students

Photo above: Dr. Roger Davis, president of CCBC, announcing the Flourish Beaver County scholarship program.

Beaver County is kicking off a campaign tonight to start something like the Pittsburgh Promise to offer college scholarships to students from Beaver County. The initiative, called Flourish Beaver County, is working to raise $22 million for scholarships to low-income and middle-income high school students to attend the Community College of Beaver County (CCBC), Geneva College or Penn State Beaver.

The goal is to reverse the population decline that’s been happening in Beaver County for the past decade by helping young people get a good education and jobs, and enticing families to live in the region through the scholarship money.

“We believe that if we improve some of our educational outcomes, we also improve our economic outcomes in the county,” says Dr. Roger Davis, president of CCBC. “The county has to grow, and so we are trying to see how we do get our county to grow? We think if we embrace our educational partners, our K through 12, then we have families that want to come and stay.”

Representatives from county government, schools, nonprofits, teachers’ unions and community-based organizations came together to create Flourish Beaver County.

The goal is to give students up to $5,000 in scholarship funding, depending on the need, and even more for the lowest-income families. This funding would start to become available in two years.