Mission | Manchester Essex Education Fund

For more than forty-three years the Manchester Essex Education Fund has helped families in Manchester, Massachusetts – and now through school regionalization, in Essex, Massachusetts, too – ease the burden of college costs by providing scholarships that support our students’ efforts to achieve a college education.

With ever-increasing tuition costs required to attend college, many families’ finances are stressed to the limit. The need for locally supported scholarships for our college-bound students has never been greater.

The Manchester-Essex Education Fund is addressing this challenge by granting college scholarships to 54 college-bound students in 2024. In addition to the Friends of the Manchester Essex Education Fund, we administrate 28 individual scholarships established in the name of a beloved teacher, administrator, student, or town citizen. You may be surprised to find that you recognize a number of them.

The Fund benefits all Manchester and Essex residents, regardless of the secondary school they attend. Although the historical focus of the Fund has been granting scholarships to graduating seniors from high school, the Fund’s mission is sufficiently broad to explore relationships and cooperative efforts with organizations such as the Spaulding Trust and Robert Hooper Trust.

The support of the Manchester and Essex communities allows us to continue our mission year to year through generous donations to our Annual Appeal. The Directors’ Program is intended to develop immediate funding of scholarships where a donor or group of donors make an annual commitment to fund all or part of a scholarship for multiple consecutive years. To learn more, download the Directors’ Program PDF.