The ledger says twenty girls. This page says which twenty.

An Idaho senior in 2021 with the grades, the sport and no particular reason to believe any of it added up to something. The cost of college was the visible problem. The quieter one was whether anybody outside her own family thought she was a leader.

An Alice & Charles Taylor Scholar-Athlete LEAD Scholarship, awarded in 2021, when the whole thing was still funded personally by the Taylor family and there was no foundation behind it.

A degree in English from Gonzaga University — and in the same week, a commission as an officer in the United States Army through ROTC. She is now preparing for active duty and applying to physical therapy school, aiming to become a physical therapist in the Army.

Mountain Home has produced generations of athletes and almost no reason for any of them to believe the wider world was interested. It is a small town with an Air Force base attached, ninety minutes from anywhere that looks like an opportunity.

A paid Changemakers Circuit session, delivered at the school. Not a favor and not a discount — the school booked it, which matters, because a session somebody paid for is a session somebody turns up to.

The Foundation’s first paid speaking engagement, delivered at the school where the scholarship began in 2015, by a graduate of the class of 1989. It is now the reference every other school asks about.

A 4.0 across every honors and dual-credit course the school offered, five sports, Student Council, Unified Sports, and coaching younger athletes. Nothing in a school system is designed to notice that particular combination — the classroom recognizes one half of it and the field recognizes the other, and nobody is looking at both at once.

An Alice & Charles Taylor Scholar-Athlete LEAD Scholarship, chosen from seventy-two applicants by a committee of teachers, principals, counselors and coaches from across Idaho. The award is $1,000 and the recognition is the other half of it.

Spokane Falls Community College, studying pre-medicine, working toward sports medicine. He got there partly on the advice of his cousin Kayler Detmer, who played softball at Stanford and is now a pediatric physician assistant — which is this Foundation’s entire theory of change, already visible one generation ahead of him, inside his own family.

A first-year nursing student at Boise State, from Mountain Home, with no professional network in health care and no obvious way to build one. This is the part of the pipeline that money does not solve. A check does not introduce you to anybody.

She received the Alice & Charles Taylor Scholar-Athlete of the Year Award at the 2026 gala. Saint Alphonsus, our MVP sponsor, had people in that room.

They did not wait. She had come off the stage and was standing at the back with her award still in her hand when their senior leadership crossed the room to find her. We made the introduction by email afterwards and advocated for her, but the decision that mattered had already been made by people who had watched her for four minutes.

She started at Saint Alphonsus as a Nursing Assistant at the beginning of June, at the end of her first year at Boise State. Not an internship and not shadowing — a paid clinical role, on the floor, at nineteen. The sponsor who paid for the room hired the scholar they met in it, which is the argument for putting student-athletes at the tables rather than at the side of them.

A scholarship is a transaction. Money moves once, the recipient writes a thank-you note, and the relationship is over before it started. There is usually no mechanism by which it becomes anything else — and no reason for an eighteen-year-old to imagine there could be.

We invited three of the 2026 scholars to our board meeting on August 3. Not to be thanked or photographed — to sit in on the discussion of the organization that had funded them, and to be asked what they thought.

It was on Zoom, which is the only reason it could happen at all. By August they were already scattering — one of them was in California before term had started.

Two of the three texted the same day. Both ended by offering to work. One proposed a change to how future scholars are selected. Ava Johnson, from the same cohort, had done the same thing unprompted a fortnight earlier.

Three scholars, three offers to contribute, none of them asked for. All are being invited to the founding LEAD Fellows cohort — which is what a leadership pipeline looks like when it is working rather than when it is being described.

Girls on the Run costs money to join. For twenty families in Mountain Home this year, that fee was the entire reason their daughter was not going to do it — not interest, not ability, not distance. The fee.

Twenty iWIN IX Momentum Grants at roughly $115 each, about $2,300 in total. The grant paid the registration. That is the whole intervention.

Twenty girls in a season of organized sport, and for many of them it will be the first. What we cannot tell you yet is how many come back next year — we have not tracked a season-over-season return rate, and until we do, we will not claim one.

Not yet. We have not asked these families, and we would rather leave this blank than fill it with something we wrote ourselves.

Nations United was founded by a teacher-librarian at South Junior High in Boise to create a place in sport for refugee young people. It is the kind of organization that does the work without anybody outside its own neighborhood knowing it exists — which is a funding problem, not a quality problem.

The Team of Allies Award at the 2026 Change Make*Hers Gala: a tribute film, the stage, three hundred and eight guests, and a room of media. We did not give them a grant. We gave them the microphone.

The outcome you would expect from a night like that is donations, and several guests said as much on the evening. That is not what Nations United can trace.

What came out of the room was two relationships. A Girls on the Run coordinator handed Mary Karol her card and offered sports bras for the girls. Against, one of our own gala sponsors, put an intern onto projects for them.

One of the organizations we fund grants into, helping another organization in the same room. That is a better outcome than a check, and it is not one we would have thought to design.