Few communities in the United States have more fully embraced the promise of the American Dream than that of Italian Americans. Their beginnings were humble: many first-generation Italian Americans left Italy with little more than the clothes on their back and a few possessions. Yet once they arrived, they worked long and hard, and made great sacrifices to improve their own lives and those of their children.

Today, only a few generations removed from the first struggling arrivals, the Italian American community has grown and prospered far beyond what its forebears could have dreamed possible.

Now the John R. Mott Scholarship Foundation (The Foundation) is working to give back to the region in Italy where its namesake was born, and from which he and his parents emigrated. The Foundation provides much-needed scholarships to deserving young people in the region of Calabria, the ancestral home of so many Italian Americans.