May is a month with five Sundays and it is our tradition for the Social Action Committee to select an organization or cause to receive a special collection.  For May, we will be splitting the collection evenly between two scholarship funds.

For many years now, the Carteret County NAACP has offered a scholarship to students at Carteret County high schools.  This year, they are hoping to award four $500 scholarships to students at any of the three county high schools – East Carteret, West Carteret and Croatan. Several members of UCF are members of the local NAACP and Rev. Sally White was the Chair of the Scholarship Committee for several years.  In the past, a Gospel Festival was held at which money was collected for these scholarships, but for the last two years, they were unable to hold the event because of COVID, and this year they are doing a Gospel Fest on Zoom, which will probably not bring in as big an audience as the live event. We would like to help supplement the funds raised at the Gospel Fest to be sure that all four scholarships can be awarded.

The other scholarship is a new one that is funded by the Citizens for Diversity in Education (CDE) — a group formed several years ago to address the lack of people of color in professional roles (teachers and administrators) in our county public education system.  Both Jo Ellen Essex and Sally Davis are members of this group.  Jo Ellen describes it as a “grow your own” scholarship for county HS students of color who are thinking of becoming educators, in the hopes that they may come back and teach here. Sally Davis added that the few teachers of color that are currently working in the county system were mostly people who grew up here in Carteret County and returned because they had roots here.  She said that our county office has been trying to attract teachers and administrators of color but it is very competitive, so the CDE group thought that offering a scholarship to help local students of color who would like to go into education would be a good way to increase our diversity in the long run.

During the month of May, please donate as you can to help us support these very worthy and needed scholarships.  You can donate in the usual ways:  put a check in the collection plate or mail it to UCF Treasurer at PO Box 425, Morehead City, 28557 (put 5^th Sunday in the memo line); call Dave Hughes and make arrangements for credit card payment; or use the “Donate” button on the bottom of this page and select “5th Sunday” in the dropdown.