Great News!  The Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation (the Foundation) and the Truman Scholars Association (TSA) have recently adopted a joint Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to bring added structure to how the two organizations work collaboratively to engage the Truman Scholar community in a lifelong commitment to public service in all its forms.

This caps a tremendously productive couple of years of re-engagement that yielded the largest single gathering of Truman Scholars in June 2009 at the National Conference, the successful launch of a $100,000 Annual Fund campaign, and the recent election of the most generationally diverse TSA Board from classes 1981 through 2006.

We invite you to read the MoU as well as a Foundation Board resolution from December 2009, which was an important foreshadowing of the MoU to come.

So why execute a MoU now when cooperation is so well assured?  This is precisely the time to seal this collaboration with a legal embrace that makes the relationship all the more enduring.   We poured much thought into the eight numbered sections of the MoU.  They do not just enumerate the types of Scholar programming that we will continue to pursue in tandem, but they set some serious expectations of how we will annually plan, budget, and strategize together. 

This MoU should signal an important change to older classes of Scholars who remember a time when the two organizations seemed to keep their distance.  To newer classes, this MoU presents a challenge to take Scholar camaraderie beyond mere social networking to deeper expressions of collaborating, including coming to the financial aid of the Foundation and TSA in this current period of economic distress.

As a former Law School Dean, Foundation Executive Secretary Frederick Slabach (MS ‘77) encouraged us to look at the alumni development model in shaping this MoU.  Special thanks to Margaret Hu (KS ‘93) for her initial drafting assistance.  Applause goes to Pooja Agarwal (MO ‘05) and her co-signatories, Fred Slabach and Max Sherman (Chair of the Foundation’s Development Fund), for ushering in this era of higher accountability in the Foundation and TSA relationship that will hopefully stand the test of time. 

Mark Cannon (OH ‘84) is a founding organizer of TSA, a former Board member (2003-05), and co-chair of the Truman Scholars Annual Fund (2009-10).

See also a Chronology of the TSA and the Truman Foundation.