Hasta La Creative!

They don’t have a clue about the ten scholarships we awarded this year. They wont have read the SCABs written by our scholarship students, or be aware that Olly Wood, who won a scholarship to the school a few years ago, has just won five pencils at D&AD.

Yes, some of our students come from privileged backgrounds. Diversity wouldn’t be diversity without them. And our course is nearly £15,000, which is a barrier for many people. But it is the most successful course of its kind. If we were a for-profit enterprise, we could double our fees and still be cheaper than Miami Ad School.

One of my proudest achievements is that our school, through our scholarship program, gave Joel Buckley the opportunity to make a better life for his family. There is no way Joel would have been able to study without his scholarship. Diversity includes helping people re-skill.

I could tell you sixty-one stories about sixty-one incredible students who have had their lives changed by our scholarship program.

Our scholarships are part funded by agencies, and part funded by me teaching or talking in various places around the world. When you visit our school, you can see the names of our agency sponsors as stars on the steps leading up to our studio. The ECDs of our sponsor agencies help us choose who to award scholarships to.

Collectively, our sponsors funded six out of ten scholarships that were awarded last year. We were also blessed with a £12k gift from Marketing Academy, with instructions to share it amongst two scholarship students who weren’t able to afford to study without a bursary.

Sponsorship of a scholarship starts at just £500 per month and comes with a number of benefits that ensure a fruitful working partnership between school and agency. (To find out more email: honor@schoolcommunicationarts.com). Most agencies spend more than that on fruit for their reception.

The industry will soon begin preparing for Cannes and its opulence, for the annual self-congratulatory nonsense that we all pretend to hate. You could sponsor a scholarship and provide a bursary with the average agency’s drinks budget over the week. We both know that this is an understatement.

When I get angry, I look for solutions. So I created this crowd-funding page for anyone going to Cannes. Simply buy one less bottle of champagne whilst you are down there, and buy it on our page instead.

When you get back, we will send you a bottle of quality British champagne, together with the story of one of the sixty-one students whose lives have been changed thanks to a scholarship at SCA.

If we sell one thousand bottles we can fund four scholarships.

That’s worth raising a glass to.

And that was worth getting angry for.

PS – Please share this message with as many people as possible. Let’s create plenty of scholarships through plenty of drinking.