After nearly three months of fundraising, Circuit Skillbuilder’s Scholarship Program fundraiser hit the goal of acquiring $10,000 in donations. This is incredible, and will allow us to give 10 under-privileged debaters $1,000 each in grant funding—funding that will help subsidize the costs of attending pricey national circuit tournaments.

Because as much as our other resources (lectures, demo debates, free prep) help, the harsh reality is that none of that really matters if debaters don’t even have the funding to compete at high-level tournaments in the first place. Indeed, our mission is to provide avenues to succeed in the national circuit, and unfortunately, the circuit is expensive. So, the success of this fundraiser hopefully is step forward in reducing the most daunting barrier to circuit success: cost.

Circuit Skillbuilder is currently in the process of creating an application for debaters to fill out so we can determine who receives the grant; we are also working on the prep rewards promised as part of our fundraiser reward system.