David Hawkins calls it “a very nice dilemma.”
There were so many excellent candidates among applicants for the first scholarship in the name of his late wife, Mary Hartwell, that choosing just one would be hard to do.
“They were just remarkably impressive,” Hawkins said this week.
“The talent pool was going to make it extremely difficult.”
So he decided to bump the funding available using money from an RRSP his wife had left him as part of her estate.
“At 69, I figured that was idle money.”
On Sunday, Aug. 19, three people were officially awarded $2,500 each.
Lucy Brain, Samantha Smith and Grace Augustinowicz are all studying food, nutrition and sustainable agriculture.
Hawkins, a director of the White Rock Farmers’ Market, hopes to establish a sustainable foundation that could fund scholarships on a continuing basis.