As a young boy, Flip Holt didn’t clearly understand the significance of his father’s involvement in founding the institution that would one day become ranked as the nation’s best community college.
As an adult, Flip fully appreciates that his father – W. Paul Holt, Jr. – helped create a legacy that continues to transform the lives of people throughout Western North Carolina.
The elder Holt was a founding member of the Board of Trustees for the institution now known as Southwestern Community College. He served in that leadership role for more than 50 years, including multiple terms as chair, and he also is credited with starting the SCC Foundation in 1973. He was actively serving as a Trustee and a member of the SCC Foundation Board of Directors until his passing in 2018.
“That fraternity of men, the ‘Founding Fathers’ of SCC, they had a vision,” Flip Holt said recently. “How they got together, I don’t know, but I think they saw an opportunity to be able to keep Western North Carolina kids in the region. … They were all smart businessmen, and they made an investment - whether it was their time, maybe some of their money I don’t know, and it’s still paying dividends today.”
The younger Holt and his wife, Cindy, who now reside in Ponte Vedra, Fla., recently decided to expand the family’s prolific impact on Southwestern by endowing two new scholarships while significantly growing several existing scholarship funds through the SCC Foundation.
The new funds will be named the “W. Paul Holt, Jr., Endowed Scholarship” in support of Business Administration programs and the “Cindy and Flip Holt Endowed Scholarship” in support of Health Sciences programs.
“It means a lot to me, and it also means a lot to my wife,” Flip Holt said. “She’s very instrumental in this. She is fully committed and ‘in.’”
Besides launching the SCC Foundation, which aims to provide a “hand up” to students who need financial assistance to pursue their educational goals, Paul Holt endowed multiple scholarships in his lifetime.
He started the “Patricia M. Holt Memorial GED Scholarship” in honor of Flip’s mother, who passed away in 1996; the Andrew P. Holt Memorial Scholarship, named in honor of Flip’s late brother, in support of the Culinary Arts program; and the Brenda Oliver Holt Nursing Scholarship, which honors Paul Holt’s second wife, who passed away last year.
Flip said he and Cindy want to continue that family tradition of supporting the college and its students because they’ve seen the difference scholarships can make in the lives of individual students - as well as the impact SCC has on the communities it serves.
“Every year in the spring around here, you see everything blooming,” Flip Holt said. “Driving up here recently, I thought about how you never see the roots of the tree. You know that’s where everything is nourished from, where it gets its water and food and all that. To me, that’s SCC. What you see here, everything blooming, is the result of kids being able to go to school for not a whole lot of money. It’s allowed a lot of people to stay here. You’ve got qualified people working in law enforcement, nursing homes, at the fire department as well as in a wide variety of other fields. Cindy and I are proud to be a part of helping some of those students come here and make a difference.”
For more information about Southwestern Community College and the career paths it offers, explore this website, call 828.339.4000 or drop by your nearest SCC location.
