A Bowling Green-based philanthropy has awarded WKU Student Publications a $10,000 grant to support training during the 2024-25 academic year.
The Billie P. Hatcher Charitable Trust made the award, marking the fifth and largest grant the trust has awarded to Student Publications since 2020. The trust is named for Billie Frances Pitchford Coots Hatcher, whose family founded the Citizen-Times newspaper and Allen County, which she led with a philosophy of “if we want to remain in business, we have to make the right decisions even thought they might not be popular.”
“In a year where we have sustained significant budget cuts and had out reserve funds drained by the university, this is truly a transformative grant,” said Chuck Clark, director of WKU Student Publications. “This grant allows us to build a training program that will help our students continue to do the kind of exceptional work that gains them recognition on the national level.”
Before she died in 2017, Mrs. Hatcher created a living trust, administered by the College Heights Foundation, to promote “good works serving the causes which I have felt strongly about throughout my life.” Among those is journalism.
The 2024-25 grant brings to $30,500 the overall investment The Hatcher Trust has made in Student Publications. The $10,000 for 2024-25 will be used to help cover costs of an enhanced basic training program, developing a speaker series, participation in national conferences with unique training opportunities and taking part in the summer College Media Mega Workshop, the best training available to college journalists.
The training opportunities enabled by the grant will focus on the future of the news and media industry and will touch each of the four student-led areas at Student Publications – the College Heights Herald newsroom, Talisman magazine, Student Publications Advertising sales force and Cherry Creative branded content studio.
“We’re so grateful to the board of The Hatcher Trust,” Clark said. “For our students, knowing that there is an organization out there investing significant money in their wellbeing is such a great incentive to reach higher.”