Lister scholarship fund grows and gives
By Sam Bishop
Hope Roberts stands with some halibut after a fishing trip in Valdez.
When Hope Roberts attended community college in Fairbanks in fall 2008, her 5- and 10-year-old children sometimes came along and sat in the hallway outside the classroom.
“They sat right there and waited and read,” she said.
She had no other choice. At the time, Roberts was a single mom studying business management at what is today the °Ä˛ĘÍĽżâ Community and Technical College.
She declines to offer many more details even today, almost 15 years later and four years into ownership of Surreel Saltwaters, a successful fishing charter operation based in Valdez.
“There was so much chaos going on,” she said. “There was no child support. There was no job.”
But there was a scholarship, $1,600 from a fund established in memory of Ruth Lister, the woman who led the community college for much of the 1990s.
The Lister scholarship kept Roberts in her classes.
“I would have had to drop out. I would have failed the classes,” Roberts said. She had five that semester. Had she dropped them, she said, “I wouldn’t have done them again.”
Doesn’t take much
Ruth Lister sits for a portrait in 1993 after being named acting director of what was then called UAF’s Tanana Valley Campus, now known as the Community and Technical College.
Friends of Lister created the scholarship in 2003, shortly after she died following a long battle with breast cancer.
“We started out with a promise to Ruth in 2002,” said Susan McInnis, who, with her spouse Joy Morrison, serves on a seven-member committee that raises money for the scholarship fund. “Joy asked her when she was in her last months what we could do in her memory.”