Gift from Goppert Foundation establishes scholarship endowment

Need-based scholarship will be offered to students attending Bloch School of Management

The University of Missouri-Kansas City Foundation is pleased to announce a $100,000 gift to the Henry W. Bloch School of Management from the Goppert Foundation of Kansas City.

The gift, which will be matched by the Marion and Henry Bloch Family Foundation, will establish the Goppert Foundation Endowed Scholarship to be offered to financially eligible management students at UMKC. The need-based scholarship is intended to attract the best and brightest students to study at the Bloch School.

Thomas Goppert, vice chairman, secretary and treasurer of the Goppert Foundation, said his family foundation is pleased to support the Bloch School with this endowment. The Goppert Foundation has established other scholarships at UMKC and other universities in the area because it wants to provide opportunities to students who might not be able to go to college without scholarship support.

Clarence Goppert, a banker who did business in rural communities in and just outside the Kansas City area, established the Goppert Foundation in 1960. Thomas Goppert, who is Clarence Goppert’s grandson, said his grandfather wanted to help the communities that had helped him.

“We try to reinvest in the stakeholder communities that allowed for the creation of the Goppert Foundation,” said Thomas Goppert, a 1977 graduate of UMKC’s management program.

The Goppert Foundation has also set up other endowments at UMKC’s School of Nursing and Health Studies.

“We like UMKC,” Goppert said. “It’s been good for the community.”

Through a matching gift program offered by the Bloch Family Foundation, the Goppert Foundation gift will create a $200,000 endowment, which will distribute approximately $9,000 annually to a student. Since October of 2013, the Bloch Family Foundation matching program has helped generate more than 30 new endowed scholarships totaling just under $2 million in additional scholarships for the Bloch School.

“Scholarships like the Goppert Foundation Endowed Scholarship make all the difference to the Bloch School and its students,” said David P. Donnelly, dean of the Bloch School of Management. “We thank the Goppert Foundation for this generous gift, which will allow us to recruit the very best and brightest students to our programs.”

The UMKC Foundation, launched in 2009, is an independent, nonprofit organization that serves as the official fundraising and fund management organization for UMKC.


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