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| Henry and Shereice Dungey
with Anabell Mejia and Entrada director Rhae-Ann Booker |
Henry Dungey ’98 is not the type of person to leave a job undone.
That’s why completing his degree at Calvin was a high priority for
him. He started at Calvin in the mid-1980s but wasn’t well-prepared
for the rigors of college, he said.
“I was expecting four pristine years,” he said. “I wasn’t
expecting some of the things that came my way that knocked me off my game
plan. I was struggling with issues; there were a few deaths in my family,
and I had some maturity issues.”
Eleven years later, Dungey returned to Calvin — this time, determined
to earn a degree. He refers to it as “the layaway plan.”
“I could have gone to some other places, but I had an unfinished
journey here,” he said. “I wanted to complete what I had started.
I knew that I would have felt a void if I had gone anywhere else.”
Dungey completed Calvin’s adult degree completion program in organizational
management and went on to earn a master’s degree in public policy
from Grand Valley State University.
Currently, he works as a director of Uniserv, a division of the Michigan
Education Association.
But his affiliation with Calvin is far from over.
“I wasn’t ‘in love’ with Calvin early on,”
he said, “but I have followed Calvin’s efforts in minority
recruitment. I started seeing an investment by Calvin in minority students,
and it wasn’t just rhetoric. It wasn’t just in a cookie-cutter
kind of way; it was in some real innovative efforts.”
Dungey was particularly interested in the Entrada
Scholars Program, the opportunity for minority high school students
to experience college learning and living while earning college credit.
This summer the program graduated 56 students, one of which was Anabell
Mejia, who will attend Calvin this fall.
Thanks to Dungey and his wife, Shereice, Mejia will receive the Henry
and Juanita Dungey Entrada Victory Award, presented to the outstanding
Entrada student of the summer program.
The scholarship honors Dungey’s parents.
“My parents invested a lot in me, and it was important to me to
show them how that affected me,” he said. “If we can make
a minor contribution that might be helpful to one of these students, that’s
truly a great investment.” |
