The VanDykes and the Altons strongly believed in the value of active participation in the life of the church and spiritual journeys. They saw the church as a Faith Community which expected a level of commitment to it from its members. Thus, it is expected that applicants have participated in programs and/or activities within First United Methodist Church (FUMC) and continue a connection with FUMC youth.

Application Forms

• HS and Post HS Form
• Seminary Scholarship Letter for those in Ordained Ministry Form
• FUMC Activity Request for Grant Form

Scholarships will be announced in early May.  It is expected that all awardees plan on attending the 2^nd Sunday May worship service when awards will be distributed.

Purpose 

The purpose of the VanDyke-Alton (VDA) Scholarship is to support:  

• Education for members of FUMC as they graduate from high school and/or continue their education beyond high school 
• FUMC’s youth program  
• Those preparing for the ordained ministry  
• Other opportunities with foci on youth and young adults   

Organization 

The VDA Scholarship Program is managed by the VDA Scholarship Committee.  The Committee makes policy and disbursement decisions. 

The finances are managed by the FUMC Foundation.   

The Fund 

The VDA Scholarship funds are invested through the First United Methodist Church Foundation, Madison, Inc. at the Wisconsin United Methodist Foundation, Inc.  

• The Treasurer of the FUMC Foundation, provides quarterly reports on the balance of funds available for distribution.  
• Upon the recommendation of the Committee, it is permissible to distribute accumulated earnings and/or some of the principal.   
• Scholarship amounts each year are based primarily on the number of qualified recipients and the level of funds available. 

Scholarships 

It is expected that applicants have participated in programs and/or activities in First United Methodist during the past year.  The Pastor(s)/staff with youth and young adults will vet the possible applicants to apply for the scholarship.  Students can submit their applications by March of the given year.   

Scholarships awarded to High School seniors will be for the same amount in a given year.  All other scholarships can be in varying amounts.   

The Committee will consider the following priority list when deciding on the annual scholarships.   

1. High School seniors 
2. Post High School young adults based on their activities in the current year with FUMC 
3. Seminary students 
4. Church activities – For example, Appalachia Service Project (ASP), Youth Missions, Methodist summer camps, retreats, etc.   

Other Activities 

The Committee may entertain other requests that are consistent with the VDA Scholarship program or the missions of FUMC related to the youth and young adult programs.   

Non-Discriminatory Statement 

Because All Means All – The VanDyke Alton Scholarship Program is open to all without regard to ethnicity, race, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, or disability. 

History of the VDA Scholarship Fund

This is written with the history from 1995-2022. 

The VanDyke-Alton Scholarship program began in 1995, when Van and Nancy VanDyke of First United Methodist Church had a vision.  They envisioned a program to provide college scholarships which would lead to strengthened ongoing relationships between the church’s youth and the congregation.

The person primarily responsible for starting the program, Lavern N. (Van) VanDyke, was born in Kimberly, WI in 1916.  Van was an outstanding high school football player, who attended Stevens Point State College (now UW-Stevens Point), where he lettered in football, basketball, and track.  Van graduated in 1941 and accepted a job coaching football and basketball at Waupaca High School.

In 1942 Van enlisted in the US Army and was deployed to the European Theater of Operations, where he saw heavy combat, including the Battle of the Bulge.  He was discharged in 1946, with the rank of Captain and returned to Waupaca to coach basketball and football.  In 1949 he enrolled in a Master’s degree program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

Van was immediately hired by new head football coach Ivan Williamson as a graduate assistant coach, and over the years, worked under four head coaches (Williamson, Milt Bruin, John Coatta, and John Jardine).  In 1976 he became an Administrative Assistant in the athletic department, and eventually Director of Grants-in-Aid from 1977 to 1981. 

Nancy Steiner was born in Stevens Point in 1919.  She and Van met while they were both working in Waupaca, where Nancy was a librarian.  After they married and moved to Madison in 1949, Nancy continued her career as a librarian at several Madison public schools.  After being a librarian at Falk Elementary School for a number of years, she was named the school’s Library Director. 

When Van and Nancy joined First United Methodist Church, Nancy immediately became active in numerous women’s and church-wide activities and programs.  She was an avid reader and loved to do stitchery projects with other church women.  Van and Nancy were dedicated to the church and to supporting church programs. 

When Van enlisted in the Army during World War II, he did so under what he called a “buddy program.”  It was an enlistment incentive through which friends who enlisted together were guaranteed they would serve together.  Van enlisted with three of his friends from Waupaca, and he would frequently say, with tears in his eyes, “Of the four of us, I was the only one who came home.”

That experience led Van to make a powerful commitment to the church.  He refused to accept any VA benefits or other Army-related income.  Instead he turned that money over to the church, or other charities.  As he put it, “I didn’t deserve any of that money.  I got to come home; my buddies didn’t.”

Van and Nancy did not have children of their own.  Instead, they essentially adopted the entire FUMC youth group as their family.  This was never more evident than during the annual youth group participation in the Appalachian Service Project (ASP).  This eight-day trip each summer was extremely popular among the church’s youth, their friends, and families. 

Every year between 1992 and 2003 Van and Nancy would go along as full-fledged workers.  They would stay in dorms or church basements with the youth, do the manual labor, and serve as phenomenal role models for the youth.

Most years the youth would return from ASP on a Sunday morning and would immediately enter the sanctuary to applause from the congregation.  And as they advanced to the front of the church, Van and Nancy were always in their midst.  They considered themselves bonafide members of the youth group.  And they were!

Nancy described their ASP experience this way, “Those kids would leave their swimming pools and country clubs, and it was surprising how they grew up and matured in one week.  It was really a labor of love for us, and so rewarding.  Van was in seventh heaven.  I really think he could have done it twelve months a year.” 

Nancy would solicit donations of home baked cookies for the ASP trips from her friends.  With all the gear the youth brought along, it was sometimes difficult to find room in the vans for all the plastic tubs of cookies her friends provided.  But they always managed to find room, and the homemade cookies were a huge hit on every ASP trip.  But the youth would not only eat the cookies themselves, they would also share them with the children of the families they were assisting.  They began to refer to this as their “cookie ministry.”

Former Youth Director Marcia Grothaus recalls the wonderful relationships Van and Nancy would develop with the youth on the ASP trips.  She describes staying in a church basement one night, and checking on the youth at 10:00 PM, which was the required time for “lights out.”  She discovered that three boys were missing, and she eventually found them in a small playroom, playing cards with Van.  She scolded them and said they needed to be in bed.  Without missing a beat, Van immediately turned to the boys and said, “See, I told you that you shouldn’t have kept me up so late.”

After describing their ASP trips, Nancy said, “I love to talk about Van.  We didn’t have any children.  We had each other.”  Marcia Grothaus said Van and Nancy were “everyone’s grandparents.”  She said, “They made up for a lot of empty spaces in the youth’s lives.”

As this close relationship with the church youth continued, Van and Nancy began to develop a plan to create a scholarship program to support church youth as they headed to college.  In planning the program, Van consulted a close FUMC friend, Bishop Ralph Alton.  Bishop Alton had retired as Bishop of the Wisconsin Conference and, in retirement, had become active in FUMC.  In recognition of this relationship, the church had bestowed on him the title “Bishop in Residence.”

Bishop Alton strongly endorsed the scholarship idea as an added way for the church to connect with its youth.  He emphasized the importance of youth programs, saying, “That’s how our young people learn to become Christians.”  Bishop Alton also had a firm recommendation for the program.  In a conversation in the hospital shortly before he died in 1994, Bishop Alton told Van to make sure the scholarships were not too easy to obtain.  He said, “Be sure they earn them.”

Van then approached church member Jim Hoyt and asked him to chair a committee to organize the scholarship program.  He told Hoyt, “I know what I want to do, but I don’t know how to do it.  That’s going to be your job.”  Sadly, Bishop Alton died in September, 1994, before the first scholarship would be presented.  Because of the significant input he, and his wife, Marian, had in the development of the program, at the Van Dyke’s request, it was launched in early 1995 as the “Bishop Ralph and Marian Alton Scholarship” program. 

Members of the church along with the families and friends of the VanDykes and Altons began to contribute to the fund and the committee decided to award the first Alton scholarships in the spring of 1995.  The original committee consisted of Jim Hoyt (chair), Van Van Dyke, Nancy VanDyke, Roger Boettcher, Gordon Johnsen, and Janice Wink.

The criteria were simple.  Recipients had to be graduating high school seniors, had to have been active in United Methodist Youth Fellowship programs, and, ideally, had been to ASP.  All scholarships for a given year were to be for the same amount.

For 1995, the committee decided to award six scholarships of $325 each, committing a total of $1,950, which was about the amount that had been contributed up to that time.  In what would become common practice in the early years, Van dramatically “complained” to the committee that if we kept spending all the donated funds, the endowment would never grow.  At that point he said, “We can’t let that happen.”  Then he took out his personal checkbook and wrote a check for $1,950.  That same ritual played out for the first four or five years of the program.

From there, the scholarship program has only grown.  In 1996 and 1997, scholarships were raised to $400.  Then in 1998 a new element was added — scholarships were included for church members preparing for the ministry.  These were typically for $1,000 each.

When Van died of West Nile Virus in 2005, at age 88, the program had just awarded eleven scholarships for that year worth $1,100 each, for a total of $12,100.  Following Van’s death, the program was renamed, the “Alton-Van Dyke Scholarship,” but its mission remained the same and its growth continued.  By 2011, the program awarded eight high school scholarships of $1,500 and one seminary scholarship of $4,000.

Beginning in 2012, on the recommendation of Youth Director Seth Schroerlucke, the scholarships were expanded again.  Seth had begun to utilize a number of college-age students to assist with the youth program, to serve as chaperones on various programs (including ASP), and to be available to help Seth.  Since the program had sufficient funds, it was decided to add a “college age” scholarship category.  These scholarships could be for varying amounts, given the different time commitments that could be made by college students.  For example, in 2013 the committee approved $9,500 in college-age scholarships of varying amounts.

Nancy VanDyke passed away in 2014 and the committee approved another name change.  The names were re-ordered, so the program became known by its current name, the “VanDyke-Alton Scholarship.”

In 2016, the program expanded again, upon a recommendation by the pastors.  The committee agreed to make a regular contribution to the scholarship program at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary as a way to connect First Church with Garrett and to give our members priority in applying for scholarship support from the seminary.  The Garrett support has been for $2,500 each year.

The program grew again in 2018.  In addition to the core (high school) scholarships, the college-age scholarships, and the Garrett scholarship support, the committee also approved a payment to ASP to support our youth participating in that program.  This meant our members would pay significantly less in tuition to participate in ASP.

With this added dimension, the amount of scholarship money approved each year increased dramatically.  The overall scholarship amount approved for 2018 was $32,500 and for 2019 was $36,500.

In 2020, the program expanded again, by approving a $3,000 grant to The Crossing, the UW-Madison campus ministry.  It was hoped this would extend connections between FUMC and campus ministry, and recognize the roles some of the campus members had been playing in the life of our church.

The program took another major step forward in 2022.  In that year alone, the committee approved $49,500 in scholarships.  The funds for this expansion were available both because of the growth of the fund and because we had an unusually small high school class (only one qualified applicant) and college-age student participation (four qualified applicants). 

This expansion included participation in initiatives determined to be significant by the overall congregation.  For example, through leadership from an adult study group, the congregation prioritized helping to provide educational opportunities for disadvantaged individuals in the Madison area.  To that end, the committee approved scholarships for disadvantaged youth to attend Omega School ($5,000) and Madison College ($5,000).  Finally, given FUMC’s role in leading a “Land Acknowledgement” initiative, the committee approved a lead gift of $10,000, matched by more than $10,000 from other church members, to establish an endowed FUMC scholarship for Native American students at Madison college.

Scholarship Amounts in Selected Years

            Year                 Total Amounts
            1995                $ 1,950
            2000                $ 5,800
            2005                $ 12,100
            2011                $ 16,500
            2015                $ 16,500
            2018                $ 32,500
            2020                $ 33,500
            2022                $ 49,500

These expansions of the Van Dyke-Alton Scholarship program have been possible because of the generosity of our donors.  The original small cluster of friends of the Van Dykes and the Altons has expanded to a church-wide base of generous donors.   The first-year contributions of $1,950 have grown, through added gifts, bequests, and prudent management by the FUMC Foundation.  On January 1st, 2022 the endowment base stood at a breathtaking $983,902.  Van Van Dyke often said his dream was to have an endowment base of $100,000.  “If we reach that,” he said, “We’ll have it made.” 

Over the years the committee has remained faithful to the original goals of the scholarship program, and has expanded it into a number of new areas.  Again, in 2022 alone, the committee “invested” a total of $49,500 in our collective futures.   We believe we have been blessed — not only by Van and Nancy Van Dyke, and Ralph and Marion Alton, but by everyone in FUMC who has so generously supported this program.  Thank you all for your support over the years.

—Jim Hoyt,  Scholarship Chair (1994-2023)