Due to the COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent high school and college closings, the Scholarship and Interest-Free Loan Program application deadline has been moved from March 31 to April 17 at 11:59pm to allow students time to acquire the necessary documents to complete the application process.

We will no longer be requiring students to upload transcripts to their application.

Please email scholar@communityfoundation.org with any questions you may have.

Obtaining a college education is expensive! Through our Scholarship and Interest-Free Loan Program, the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts (CFWM) strives to provide some financial assistance to students living primarily in the Pioneer Valley. Our scholarships and interest-free loans are available to you because very generous donors in our region want to help you go to college and graduate, and so do we.

Our program is quite large. We offer over 130 different scholarship and 2 different interest-free loans. Each year we give away over 1000 individual scholarship awards. This equates to approximately $1.4 million in scholarships and $600 thousand in interest-free educational loans.

The good news is you don’t complete multiple applications for those scholarships in which you think you are qualified. Instead, you only have to complete one application and we will match you with all the scholarships for which you are eligible.

Scholarships and interest-free educational loans are provided for one academic year and are not automatically renewed each year. You can reapply to our Program each year you are going to attend college. We really encourage you to reapply because you may receive an award in one year even if you didn’t in another. You could also get a different scholarship or loan from one year to another.