Canadiens Alumni Foundation hands out first non-athletic scholarship

The St. Paul Canadiens Alumni Foundation has made another first.

On Tuesday, they presented Ashmont School student George Houle the first non-athletic scholarship at Saik Insurance, who have been major supporters of the scholarship program.

They were also joined by Linda Sallstrom of STEP, who have aligned with the Alumni Foundation in recent weeks.

Houle received $1,000 and when he found out he was the individual chosen for the scholarship about a month ago, he said it was surreal.

He had to write an essay as part of the application process.

“For my essay, I just wrote from the heart. One day I just wrote everything I would like to tell about myself. And a lot of it derives from my mosom because my mosom meant a lot to me. And he’s a big inspiration in my life and I really aspire to be like him. He is the crux of my essay that I submitted to them,” said Houle.

Houle was joined by his mother and Ashmont School principal.

“George is definitely one of our top students within the school. He has so much ambition, so much independence, and he just shone through this year with all the initiatives he took on. He’s our student body president, so he took on a lot of initiatives within the school to kind of bring some normalcy back to our student body,” said Mrs. Corina Idzan.

“With coming out of COVID, we knew it was definitely needed for our students mental health and George took that on himself. He did a lot of things to improve the students, you know, daily lives in school, which was awesome. And just his initiative and his ambition just is top notch and he’s going to do great things.”

Alumni president Pat Lamoureux said it’s precedent setting in the community, with a 10-year commitment from Saik Insurance to hold these scholarship programs.

“We’ve gone from being focused and laser beamed on the hockey club, to alumni, to a foundation to a charity, to all these initiatives. Now, it’s spilling over to becoming a greater community foundation,” said Alumni president Pat Lamoureux.

“We were overwhelmed with applicants that applied for the scholarship program, for non-athletic in conjunction with the Saik family and our foundation. And George is a fine student from Ashmont.”

Houle will be attending the University of Alberta in the fall and taking the business program.

“We wanted to get another component involved on the education part, something a little bit different for us. We feel a need. And hopefully it kind of builds from there,” said Shawn Saik.