UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. (May 21, 2012) -- Penn State alumni William and Jeri Simon have established the Simon Family Trustee Scholarship in the Penn State Smeal College of Business. With gift-matching funds from the H.J. Heinz foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports charitable giving by all H.J. Heinz Co. employees, the endowment will be valued at $50,000, and its impact will be doubled with support from the University's Trustee Matching Scholarship Program.
"I'm very grateful for Bill and Jeri's support of undergraduate business education at Penn State," said James B. Thomas, the John and Becky Surma Dean of Smeal. "Many of our students end up just shy of the threshold for receiving state and federal financial aid but still need financial assistance to attend college. The Simon Family Trustee Scholarship will help fill this void and aid generations of students who need just a little help to earn a degree."
William Simon is vice president, R&D operations, at H.J. Heinz Co. in Pittsburgh. His research and development responsibilities include driving all project management and optimization efforts as well as enabling new product development and global integration initiatives.
He has been with Heinz since earning his master's of business administration from Smeal in 1994. He also holds a bachelor's degree in marketing from Smeal, where he graduated in 1989. Simon is chair of the Smeal MBA Alumni Advisory Board and an ex-officio member of the Smeal Alumni Society Board.
Jeri Simon is a 1990 graduate of Smeal with a bachelor's degree in management. She is a history teacher at the Ellis School, an independent girls' school in Pittsburgh.
The Trustee Matching Scholarship Program maximizes the impact of private giving while directing funds to students as quickly as possible, meeting the urgent need for scholarship support. In this groundbreaking philanthropic model, Penn State matches 5 percent of the total pledge or gift at the time a Trustee Scholarship is created, making funds available immediately for student awards. This University match, which is approximately equal to the endowment's annual spendable income, continues in perpetuity, doubling the support available for students with financial need.
The Simon Family Trustee Scholarship will help the Smeal College of Business to reach its goals in For the Future: The Campaign for Penn State Students. This University-wide effort is directed toward a shared vision of Penn State as the most comprehensive, student-centered research university in America. The University is engaging Penn State's alumni and friends as partners in achieving six key objectives: ensuring student access and opportunity, enhancing honors education, enriching the student experience, building faculty strength and capacity, fostering discovery and creativity, and sustaining the University's tradition of quality. The campaign's top priority is keeping a Penn State degree affordable for students and families. The For the Future campaign is the most ambitious effort of its kind in Penn State's history, with the goal of securing $2 billion by 2014.
For more information on the For the Future campaign, visit giveto.psu.edu.