The East Cascades Bird Alliance (ECBA) is excited to announce its first annual youth scholarship for a student and a parent/guardian to attend the Southeast Arizona Birding Festival in Tucson, Arizona scheduled for August 6 to August 10, 2025.
For more information, please see the Southeast Arizona Birding Festival .
This scholarship is open to students who meet the following requirements: (1) be between the ages of 13 and 17 at the time of the Festival; and (2) reside in or attend school in Crook, Deschutes, Jefferson, Wheeler or Grant counties in the state of Oregon at the time of the submission of the Youth Scholarship Application*. ECBA’s hope is that this scholarship will encourage young people in Central Oregon to pursue their interests in birds, birding, conservation, and the natural world.
The scholarship will cover the cost of the registration for the Festival and a stipend to help cover the costs of traveling to and from the Festival, staying in Tucson, and incidentals (up to $2,500), and a year’s membership to ECBA.
Students must submit a completed application that includes an essay and letter of recommendation from a teacher or adult mentor by March 15th, 2025.
The scholarship is made possible by donations to ECBA and the generous support of its members.
*Note that the scholarship was initially intended to be for the American Birding Association’s Camp Colorado, but the camp was cancelled for 2025.
ECBA Youth Scholarship Committee
The winner of the ECBA Youth Scholarship will be determined by a committee of three members. Each member will review each application. Each member will assign a score (1-5) for two parts of the application: the personal essay and the letter of recommendation. Each numerical rating should be a whole number with no fractions. For each candidate, those two numbers will be combined for a total score.
For the personal essay, the member will assign the highest number of points to an essay that is well written, free of errors, and provides a compelling reason, or set of reasons, for wanting to win the scholarship and attend the Southeast Arizona Birding Festival in Tucson, Arizona scheduled for August 6 to August 10, 2025 (the “Festival”) .
For the letter of recommendation, the member will assign the highest number of points to a candidate that has a letter of recommendation that provides enthusiastic support, states several reasons why the candidate should receive the award, and also provides multiple examples of the candidate’s merit. The lowest number of points, on the other hand, would be given to a candidate who submits a letter of recommendation that shows no enthusiasm, and barely mentions why they deserve the award.
If a committee member has a strong personal relationship with an applicant, the committee member will recuse themself for that applicant and the alternative committee member will review that application and assign it a numerical rating.
The ratings for each applicant will be totaled and the winner will be the applicant with the highest total score. In the event of a tie, each committee member will rank the tied applicants with a first (#1), second (#2), third (#3), etc. (depending on the number of tied applicants). For example, if there were two applicants with the same total score, each committee member would assign each applicant either a first or second designation. The applicant with the lowest total score would be the winner.
In the unlikely event that doesn’t resolve a tie, a coin toss will be used to choose between two finalists. If there are more than two tied finalists, the name of each finalist will be written on a piece of paper of the same size and folded in half. Those pieces of paper would be put into a container from which one of the committee members would pull from at random with at least one other committee member present. The first name chosen would be the winner.
Timeline
1 Application Deadline. March 15th, 2025.
2 Application Review Deadline. April 1st, 2025.
3 Announcement of Winner. April 5th, 2025.
4 Target Registration Opening for the Festival. April 29th, 2025.
For questions, please contact us at ecba@ecbirds.org
