Since its inception during the 1989-1990 academic year, the John G. Phillips Foundation has awarded about $249,000 to many worthy college and university students to help them meet the costs of their education.

      The Foundation, established in the name of the late John G. Phillips, makes available a number of scholarships to undergraduate and graduate students, with preference to those of Nisyrian descent.

      The Foundation is named for John G. Phillips, who contributed the endowment fund that makes possible the awarding of annual scholarships. Born in Nisyros in 1906, Mr. Phillips migrated to the United States in 1923 in search of work. Many years of hard work and struggle ensued, with Mr. Phillips ultimately achieving financial success in the artificial flower business. Later in life, remembering how he had struggled as a young man to make his way in the world and how the need to work in order to survive kept him from pursuing the formal education he wanted, he decided to establish a foundation that would provide worthy students with economic assistance. A man with great respect for learning, he was uncomfortable with the idea that financial constraints could prevent students from pursuing and fulfilling their academic goals. Mr. Phillips intended his foundation to assist young men and women in this respect, helping to make a reality for others the dream that had eluded him. Mr. Phillips died in 1986, but his foundation lives on, a testament not only to his tenacity and ambition but to his generosity and sense of social responsibility as well.