KANSAS CITY – Since 1989, the Bright Futures Fund has offered thousands of children a pathway out of poverty—a Catholic education. In the early years, the Fund (then known as the Central City Schools Fund) helped families in need send their children to Catholic grade schools by providing need-based tuition assistance scholarships. Today, through partnerships with local Catholic high schools, graduates of Our Lady of Hope and Holy Cross schools can receive both need and merit based scholarships to attend one of those schools and be nearer to realizing their dreams. And college has become real for Bright Futures students through a partnership with Avila University.
A number of Bright Futures Fund alumni have earned scholarships to Avila and other colleges and universities through hard work, study and persistence, and are seeing a clearer path to their own future and freedom from poverty. Maria Rojas is one.
She walks purposefully through the UMKC campus, heading for classes or the library or to the Student Union for a break. The sophomore in the university’s pre-med program first became interested in medicine at an 8th grade career day at Our Lady of Angels School, now Our Lady of Hope.

KANSAS CITY — Bishop John J. Sullivan established the Central City School Fund in 1989 to help families in Kansas City’s urban core attend Catholic schools. A lay board was formed in order to raise funds to support the schools of parishes that were unable to provide enough support.  There were eight schools designated for assistance at the time. Over the years some schools closed, and time, resources and several in close proximity to other fund-assisted schools forced it to scale back.
The fund was also challenged due to the increased need of attending families coupled with rising educational costs.
In 2010, the name of the fund was changed to the Bright Futures Fund. The charter was redrawn to provide the opportunity to reshape the mission of the fund to accommodate schools within the diocese but outside the Kansas City School district, as the fund staff and board began studying the needs of the community.
Jeremy Lillig was hired by the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph in 2011 as Director of the Bright Futures Fund. He established a new and expanding board “committed to what we deemed a ‘renaissance’ of efforts to improve, create sustainable growth, and continue to make effective change.”

KANSAS CITY — Usually, co-chairs for events and programs are husband-wife teams. The diocesan Bright Futures Fund, which recently launched the “Shine Brightly” success plan, named three father-daughter teams as its capital campaign co-chairs—unique, surprising and likely a long-term win-win for the Shine Brightly plan and for the Bright Futures Fund schools.
The Bright Futures Fund raises funds to fully support operating costs of Holy Cross and Our Lady of Hope schools and subsidizes tuition costs for nearly 100 percent of the students. In addition, the Fund helps several partner schools in Kansas City, Montrose and Nevada, Missouri.
The Shine Brightly plan, which is expected to be fully implemented in the next 18 months, will necessitate facility improvements, new curriculum and instructional resources, scholarship and reserve funding for the schools and expanded support for the three partner schools. To that end, a $5.2 million capital campaign has been initiated.