Five years after a $1,000 scholarship
In 2021 there was no Taylor LEAD Foundation. No board, no committees, no website, no 501(c)(3). There was a family in Idaho who had announced a scholarship from a podium in Mountain Home six years earlier and had been quietly paying for it themselves ever since.
That year one of the awards went to Addison McCluskey.
Last year she graduated from Gonzaga University with a degree in English. In the same week, she commissioned as an officer in the United States Army through ROTC. She is now preparing for active duty and applying to physical therapy school, with the goal of becoming a physical therapist in the Army.
What the money did, and what it did not
We should be careful here, because it would be easy and dishonest to claim a $1,000 award produced an Army officer.
It did not. Addison did. So did her family, her ROTC mentors, and the coaches and teachers she names herself.
What we can tell you is what she says the scholarship did, and she is more precise about it than we would have been:
"It didn't just help me with the cost of college. It showed me that others believed in my leadership potential."
That is the part a check cannot buy and the part nobody puts on a grant report. An eighteen-year-old in Idaho with good grades and a sport has a fair idea of what her family thinks of her. What she often has no idea about is what somebody outside her family thinks.
Which is why the selection process looks the way it does
Our scholarship is decided by a committee of teachers, principals, counselors, coaches and regional leaders from across Idaho — not by the Taylor family, and not by anybody who knows the applicants.
The practical reason is fairness. The other reason is the one Addison names. An award means something different when it comes from a room of strangers who read your application and decided. That is a signal, and signals are what young people in small places are short of.
Five years is the whole point
Almost everything a young foundation can show you is recent. We funded twenty girls this year. We named fourteen scholars this year. Both true, both good, and neither tells you anything about what happens next, because not enough time has passed.
Addison received her award in 2021. Five years is enough for an outcome to have shape: a degree, a commission, a direction. It is the first story we have where the answer to "and then what?" is not "we will find out."
There will be more of these, because there are eleven years of recipients and most of them are now in their twenties. We simply have not asked them, which is a failure of ours rather than a shortage of stories.
What she would tell an applicant
Asked what she would say to future applicants, she did not talk about grades:
"Be bold and honest about your story. The scholarship supports leaders in the making, and you do not need to have it all figured out yet."
Applications for the 2026–27 cycle open on December 1.
One thing we did not plan
The scholarship is named for Charles and Alice Taylor. Charles served twenty-seven years in the United States Air Force.
Five years after their names went on an award, it is helping put a newly commissioned officer through physical therapy school. Different branch, same idea, and nobody arranged it.
