The scholarship fund continues to inspire future health care professionals and garner generous support, including the record $344,552 raised this year.
As an undergraduate at the University of California-Santa Barbara, Jesse Dalton by sheer chance encountered his homeless uncle who was living in a local park and asking for change. A former art teacher loved and known by friends as “the Professor,” the man was dead three days later.
That inspired Dalton to volunteer with a local church and the organization Doctors Without Walls-Santa Barbara Street Medicine to work with health care providers in offering free medical services to people in the area who were underserved and homeless. And that inspired his decision to become a physician.
DMU’s Glanton Minority Scholarship is letting him and other DMU students pursue that dream.
“Each of your contributions is helping me get one step closer to becoming a compassionate and caring physician for the underserved,” the second-year DMU osteopathic medical student told the audience at the Oct. 8 Glanton Minority Scholarship Dinner. “I am truly honored to be a recipient of the Glanton Scholarship and am forever grateful for your generosity. I assure you that I will be the best physician I can be and will never lose my sense of compassion, especially for patients like my uncle, the Professor.”
Established in 2004 by then-DMU President Terry Branstad, former and now current Iowa governor, the scholarship honors Willie Stevenson Glanton, J.D., and the late Judge Luther T. Glanton Jr., J.D., Iowa civic leaders and longtime members of the DMU Board of Trustees. It provides scholarship support for minority students under-represented in health care. Since its founding, the fund has provided nearly $1.35 million in scholarships; as of early fall, its endowment exceeded $2 million.
That number got a boost at the 12th annual Glanton Dinner, which raised a record $344,552.
“I know all of us here tonight are of like minds that the most important purpose we celebrate is the promise of aspiring health care professionals, including recipients of the Glanton Scholarship,” DMU President Angela Walker Franklin, Ph.D., stated at the dinner. “Please know the great impact you, our donors, have had and the remarkable ripple effect of your generosity.”
Also celebrated at this year’s event were the impacts of Gov. Branstad and the late Ed Skinner, J.D., a central Iowa attorney, civic leader and economic development advocate. Mr. Skinner was among the first and most consistent supporters of the Glanton Fund.
Gov. Branstad is Iowa’s longest-serving governor, from 1983 to 1999 and again beginning in 2010; as of December 2015, he will become the longest-serving governor in American history, with 21 years total so far. As DMU president, from 2003 to 2009, he took the University from a local institution to one with statewide and regional visibility.
