Professor of Finance Robert Strong is the longtime adviser of the Student Portfolio Investment Fund (SPIFFY), launched in the early 1990s by the University of Maine Foundation with $200,000. Today, SPIFFY manages a $2.3 million portfolio and has a dedicated Bloomberg monitor in the new Gerard S. Cassidy ’80 Capital Markets Training Laboratory.
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Guests heard from UMaine student Jennifer Morrill from Holden, Maine. Morrill is a secondary education and history double major. She is Delta Phil Epsilon sorority’s vice-president of academic affairs and founding member, and a member of the Order of Omega, the Golden Key and Alpha Lambda Delta honor societies. Morrill shared her personal story of scholarship support keeping her in school while struggling with a health crisis.
Foundation President/CEO Jeffery Mills shared the latest Legacy Society statistics including membership of over 800, over $60 million in gifts received over the last ten years and a recent bequest gift of over $2 million from Legacy Society member John M. Nickerson ’59.
The group was entertained by Renaissance, an auditioned female a capella group which is part of the University Singers from the School of Performing Arts.
A new fund has been established at the University of Maine Foundation in honor of the late founder of the Maine Folklife Center Edward “Sandy” Ives and his wife Bobby.
The Sandy and Bobby Ives Fund will be used to provide financial assistance to full-time UMaine students engaging in ethnography, folklore or oral history fieldwork in Maine and the Canadian Maritime Provinces. The UMaine Humanities Center director will oversee the awards to students.
The fund was established in 2014 with a gift from David Taylor and LeeEllen Friedland in recognition of Ives’ mentorship and friendship throughout Taylor’s academic experience at UMaine.
Ives was a popular UMaine English and anthropology professor from 1955–99, an internationally known folklorist and founder of the Maine Folklife Center. He was married to Bobby Ives for 57 years before his death in 2009.
Two undergraduate students who are studying folklore — Hilary Warner-Evans and Taylor Cunningham — recently spoke at a reception to announce the fund.
Warner-Evans of West Bath, Maine, is an undergraduate Honors student in anthropology and one of the first UMaine students to take the new folklore minor. Since 2012, she has volunteered at the Maine Folklife Center, where she has contributed to the center’s community outreach efforts by conducting research for its Maine Song and Story Sampler on Fogler Library’s Digital Commons.
Warner-Evans will present her fieldwork on songs written about the North Pond Hermit at the National Collegiate Honors Council conference in Denver this November. She also presented her folkloric research on Geoffrey Chaucer’s, “The Franklin’s Tale,” at Plymouth State University’s Medieval and Renaissance Forum last spring.
Taylor Cunningham of Massachusetts is an English major and Honors student with a minor in folklore studies. She is the coordinator of a new interdisciplinary humanities series of lectures on linguistics and culture, and has been working on the Maine Hermit Project for two years.
The Maine Hermit Project is a collaborative interdisciplinary humanities lab venture involving a team of undergraduate researchers working with Sarah Harlan-Haughey, an assistant professor in UMaine’s Honors College and Department of English.
Cunningham has presented her work on greening the humanities in Honors at the National Collegiate Honors Council conference in New Orleans.
Both students are conducting research on songs and ballads written about the North Pond Hermit, as well as conducting interviews, for a book on the topic. The book — co-written by members of the Maine Hermit Project lab using the Maine Folklife Center archives, Fogler Library’s Special Collections and new fieldwork — will explore different facets of Maine’s interest in and valorization of hermits and outlaws, according to Harlan-Haughey.
Both scholarship recipients and donors were celebrated at a reception in Buchanan Alumni House hosted by University of Maine President Susan J. Hunter and University of Maine Foundation President/CEO Jeffery N. Mills on October 17 as part of Homecoming Weekend.
Scholarship recipient, Jason Seymour from the UMaine class of 2017 delivered a grateful message about transitioning to college as a non-traditional student.
Jason is a nursing major and a member of the Golden Key International Honor Society. He was a 2013-14 Onward Peer Advisor and in the Onward class of 2012-13.
A $1 million donation to the University of Maine by alumnus Tom Savage and his wife, Sally, of Key Largo, Florida, will launch the Savage Challenge, a five-year endowment drive for the men’s ice hockey program.
The donation will be used to match up to $1 million in gifts from UMaine hockey alumni and former coaches to the endowment fund, which will be held at the University of Maine Foundation.
The second annual David M. Cheney Memorial Golf Tournament was held on Oct. 4, 2014 in Boxford, MA. Organizers for the event report that it was a sell-out. Proceeds from the event will benefit the David M. Cheney Scholarship Fund held at the University of Maine Foundation.
Cheney was a senior at the University of Maine when he tragically lost his life on November 16, 2012 as a result of a small plane crash in Owls Head.
The scholarship was created to honor David’s memory and his admiration for life. Cheney’s family chose to help other students attain a college education at UMaine through this scholarship.
The 2013 tournament raised over $16,000 in Cheney’s memory, it is expected that the final tally from the 2014 will exceed that total.
For more information about supporting this scholarship or establishing a new one, please contact the University of Maine Foundation.
