Pay It Forward Student Fund

Pay it Forward is a student fund centered around “students helping students.” It is a student fund maintained and funded in part by the students, faculty, and staff of the College of Business and provides a unique opportunity to help students develop personally and professionally. The monies raised are matched up to $2,000 by Ron Whitton of Dentsmart.

The initials in the endowed fund’s logo (MPW) pay tribute to former Interim Dean Gerry McKean, former Senior Director of Development Norris Porter, and its founder Ron Whitton. The fund’s funding base was provided by a group of alumni, including Ron Whitton, Paul Koch, Erick Miner, Gary Ritchie, Katie Hill-Gottesman, Nate Webb, John Denning, Jay Jochums, Andrea Whitton and Jonathon Rdzak, who together pledged to contribute to the scholarship initiative.

With that healthy start, Ron ushered in a new phase of the student fund this fall of 2017 when he announced a matching campaign. The 1980 ISU alum issued a challenge to current students in the College of Business to make donations to help their peers and promised to personally match their gifts dollar for dollar. The initial purpose - and continuing underlying theme – of the campaign is to get students in “the habit of giving back" to the school before they graduate so that it becomes “part of who they are.”

Ideas for the implementation of the funding came from student focus groups, interviews, and a class project held in the spring of 2017 in Dr. Hulda Black’s class. From the student ideas came a concept to raise monies for the fund.