SaddleBrooke Community Outreach Endowment Fund Awards Three Graduate School Scholarships

In 2001, SaddleBrooke Community Outreach (SBCO) began awarding two and four-year college scholarships. In 2019, SBCO established a scholarship endowment fund so that more scholarships could be granted without taking money from other SBCO programs. Donations made to the fund are managed by Community Foundation for Southern Arizona (CFSA), a 501c3 non-profit organization, CFSA was founded in Tucson in 1980 and has managed more than $200 million in grants over the past four decades. Even if SBCO should one day cease to exist, endowment fund donations will continue to be used to fund scholarships for future generations of students.

Each year, CFSA designates an amount that SBCO can use to award scholarships. To date, these funds have been used to award one-time graduate school grants. This year, the funds were distributed to three students:

Makaiah Gorham – Master’s of Global Management, ASU Thunderbird School of Global Management

Clarissa Gonzalez – Master’s of Social Work, Northern Arizona University

Sarah Perz – Master’s of Health Management, Eller College of Management, University of Arizona

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In the coming months, we plan to profile all three students in SaddleBrooke and SaddleBrooke Ranch publications. This month, the focus is on Makaiah Gorham.

After graduating from San Manuel High School in 2017, Makaiah volunteered in the Philippines for two years, performing tasks ranging from pulling weeds and cleaning gutters to typhoon preparation and clean-up. He continued to volunteer and work full-time while attending Pima Community College, where he finished with a 4.0 GPA. In 2020, he moved to attend Brigham Young University-Hawaii, majoring in business marketing and minoring in psychology and Mandarin. SBCO awarded Makaiah scholarships for all four years of his undergraduate studies. While at BYU, Makaiah raised funds for Ukraine, led a project in outer Mongolia to improve soil quality, traveled to approximately 20 countries and started an ongoing business in the Philippines.

This summer, he will begin pursuing a master’s in business administration at Arizona State University Thunderbird School of Global Management, focusing on global entrepreneurship. SBCO has given him a one-time graduate school grant to help support his studies. Upon graduation, Makaiah plans to move to the Philippines, grow his existing business and expand it to Indonesia, India and Africa. Approximately 70 percent of the students in the program at Arizona State University are from India or Africa, making it an ideal training site for his goals.

Makaiah says, “All of these amazing experiences I’ve had—the travel, the jobs, the people and the achievements have all been because I have been here at BYU-Hawaii and SBCO has subsidized a huge amount of my tuition and I cannot thank you enough.”