SAVANNAH, Ga. — The application had no essay prompt in the usual sense. Seniors were asked to make a video — not on why they deserved the money, but on why alumni should reach back to their own school and community at all.
The question traced back to a poem. The Bridge Builder, by Will Allen Dromgoole, tells of an old man who crosses a chasm and stops to build a bridge behind him, for a traveler he'll never meet. It became the frame for the Collective's first scholarship: alumni who'd already crossed were being asked, in effect, why they'd bother building anything for someone coming after.
The seniors answered in their own videos, in their own words, on their own terms.
"A lot of scholarships are need based or merit base but I was more interested in finding a student that really understood the mission. The collective and my line brothers agreed. We found that student." - Doug Walker
In December 2025, the Collective awarded $1,000 to a graduating senior — the organization's first scholarship, months before it would formally become a 501(c)(3). The money didn't come from the Collective's own funds; it came from the Delta Kappa Chapter of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc., raised by the chapter's 2008 initiates. The Collective administered the award — screened the videos, ran the process — but the check traced back to a the fraternity of a Windsor Forest alumnus that graduated nearly two decades before the senior who received it.
It was a small number attached to a large idea: that the bridge in Dromgoole's poem doesn't get built once. Two months later, the Collective's second alumni weekend would close with a service day for families who lived the community of the school that connects us all, Windsor Forest. The scholarship was the Collective's first bridge. It would not be its last.
