It started with a son’s gift of love, then swelled into the gratitude of generations.
When attorney David Chapnick wrote a $25,000 check to the Hunter College Foundation creating a scholarship honoring his late mother, Goldie Kraft Chapnick ’30, he knew that he had birthed a great idea.
The 2003 donation was noted briefly in Giving at Hunter, but it had not yet hatched into the decades long campaign that has raised almost $11 million for thousands of Hunter students. Chapnick, who became a trustee of the Hunter College Foundation, pressed the idea with then-Hunter College President Jennifer J. Raab. Hunter, after all, had been a women’s college for most of its more than a century of existence and had educated some of the most accomplished women in America – many of whom had been the first in their families to go to college. Of course, their relatives would want to honor these beloved figures. He and President Raab sent solicitations to a core group of 400 families of devoted alumni.
The Mother’s Day Scholarship Campaign also put a notice in the Spring 2005 issue of At Hunter.
“Did your mother go to Hunter?” the headline asked, adding, “This Mother’s Day give your mother a gift that honors her Hunter heritage and gives a new generation of students the opportunity for a Hunter education.”
An idea contributed by President Raab greatly interested potential donors: “Gifts of $2,500 or more will be acknowledged in a special advertisement in The New York Times on Mother’s Day.”
From there, the infant campaign grew quickly. Families and friends clamored to honor not only mothers, but the sisters, aunts, teachers, friends, and many other women who had enriched their lives.
“From David’s first gift, this extraordinary campaign has provided thousands of students with scholarships that enable them to purse their education free from financial hardship.” said Hunter College Foundation Executive Director Alexis L. Eggleton. “It has generated many new donors, both as word spread about the campaign, and has Mother’s Day Scholarship recipients graduated, prospered, and have paid their success forward by becoming Mother’s Day donors themselves.”
Since its start, love, gratitude, affection, and reverence have powered the Mother’s Day Scholarship Campaign year after year, leading to many repeat donations.
The families of Joan Hansen Grabe ’60, Klara Apat Silverstein ’54, MA ’56; and Ruth Newman ’54 have donated every year.
The list of donations will be studied for its insights into the history of Hunter College — and New York City.
For example, in 2010, real-estate developer and former Consumer Affairs Commissioner Bruce Ratner and former Parks Commissioner Henry Stern donated in honor of “our friend and mentor,” Bess Myerson ’45, the former Miss America and consumer-affairs commissioner. In 2011, the owners of The New York Times, the Ochs–Sulzberger family, gave a gift in honor of Rachel Piexotto Hays Sulzberger 1878. Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., the former Times publisher, still honors Piexotto, his great-grandmother, in the Mother’s Day rolls.
Philanthropist Bruce Hoffman, a Hunter College Elementary School alumnus, embodies the notion of filial (and husbandly) piety. He has given Mother’s Day donations in honor of his grandmother Belle Steinhardt, 1903, and his great-aunt Rose Steinhardt, 1905. In 2023, he named the welcome center at Hunter’s Counseling & Wellness Services for his late wife, Dr. Perry D. Hoffman, who was not a Hunter alum.
It’s stories uniting the generations that have made the Mother’s Day Scholarship Campaign such a special part of giving at Hunter.
