This scholarship is in honor of Merle Fisher.

Gail was a long-time resident of Chillicothe. She taught for many years at Chillicothe High School. She along with her husband, Bob, founded the Eastern Avenue Lumber Company in 1946. Gail was active in many organizations in the community including the Eastern Star, Rainbow for Girls, Trinity United Methodist Church among many others. The scholarship is being given by her nephew, Everett Gallagher, a 1979 graduate and valedictorian of Chillicothe High School.

During the Depression, an attorney in Missouri had a client who couldn’t pay him in money for services, and instead paid him in land. Many years later, this farmland was passed down to a local resident, who in turn subsequently sold the farm. In homage to her ancestors, many of whom were educated women in a time when that wasn’t the “norm,” this local resident started this scholarship with the proceeds from the sale of the farm to help provide higher education funding and other support to local survivors of sex trafficking.

The purpose of the Columbus and Franklin County Federation of Women’s Club Scholarship Fund shall be to make scholarship awards available for the benefit of women attending Otterbein University as full-time students in the field of education.

The deadline for Chillicothe and Ross County organizations to submit grant applications to the Robert E. and Genevieve B. Schaefer Fund of Community Foundations, Inc. is Friday, October 27, 2017.

Twenty-two local nonprofits received grants totaling more than $1.9 million to invest in capital needs, from facility expansion and renovation to technology upgrades and vehicle acquisition, thanks to the Capital Improvement Funding Partnership of The Columbus Foundation and the Osteopathic Heritage Foundation.

The Robert E. and Genevieve B. Schaefer Fund has awarded 15 grants totaling $135,546 to organizations serving the City of Chillicothe and Ross County.

The Columbus Foundation’s Governing Committee recently approved more than $1.4 million in grants to support 51 arts organizations serving central Ohio.

Hundreds of nonprofit leaders and philanthropic funders from across Columbus convened at The Columbus Foundation today to hear the results from the seminal publication Giving USA: The Annual Report on Philanthropy, which was released earlier this week.

After a highly successful beta phase, which raised over $100,000 from donors across the region, The Columbus Foundation today officially released Better Together, the first crowdfunding platform built specifically to support nonprofit organizations in central Ohio.