Photo: Contributed
(L to R): Penny Lane Legacy Fund’s Bruce Hallquist and Orv Robson, OC regional dean Alison Gibson, OC Foundation executive director Helen Jackman, and Yasmin John Thorpe and Rick Thorpe.
Yasmin and Rick Thorpe, in partnership with Summerland’s Penny Lane Legacy Fund, have created a $50,000 bursary fund for Okanagan College health-care students.
The Caring for Health Care Students Fund will provide six bursaries between $750 and $1,750 for eligible students at OC’s Penticton campus.
“We know if we educate health-care professionals in Penticton, there’s a good chance they’ll stay and work in the region,” Yasmin said in a press release. “We want to help increase the number of health-care staff throughout the South Okanagan Similkameen to help ease current pressures in the system.”
The fund is an expansion of the Thorpe and Friends Scholarship Fund and will go annually to students in Okanagan College’s practical nursing diploma and health-care assistant diploma programs.
Students who reside in Penticton, Summerland and elsewhere in the South Okanagan Similkameen region are eligible to apply.
“Health care is a personal issue for everyone,” Penny Lane Legacy Fund chairman Orv Robson said. “My wife needs medical support on a regular basis, and though we’ve received great care, we also see the strain the system is under.
“It’s important for my family and society as a whole to have a functioning health care system to care for our community’s most vulnerable.”
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