Alabama Power Foundation Awards USD 2,500 Grants in First Year of Community Scholars Program
The Alabama Power Foundation has named its first cohort of Community Scholars recipients, each receiving a one-time scholarship of USD 2,500 for use at a community college, college, or university of choice this fall.
Among the recipients is Laura Lee Putnam, a graduate of Conecuh Springs Christian School. Putnam will attend Troy University this fall and plans to pursue a degree in elementary education.
Kelicea Spagner of The Calhoun High School was also named a recipient in the program's inaugural year. Spagner will receive the same one-time USD 2,500 award, usable at the community college, college, or university of their choice this fall.
The award structure is a single disbursement rather than a renewable multi-year grant, and the foundation leaves the choice of institution to the recipient, including two-year community colleges. That design keeps the per-student commitment fixed and portable across institution types.
The Putnam award was announced in a press release published by The Union Springs Herald on September 2, 2026. The Herald is located at 324 Ellis Street, Union Springs, AL 36089, with telephone number (334) 738-2360.
For an anglophone readership tracking regulated utilities, the mechanism matters more than the sums. A utility-affiliated foundation running a named scholarship program creates a direct, repeatable channel between a rate-regulated business and the school districts inside its service territory, with awards attached to identified secondary schools rather than to a general application pool. Conecuh Springs Christian School and The Calhoun High School are both named in the awards, which anchors the program to specific local institutions.
The reference to an inaugural year sets a baseline against which any later expansion in recipient numbers or award size can be measured. At USD 2,500 per recipient, the program's cost scales linearly with cohort size, so the observable signal in subsequent cycles is the count of named recipients rather than the headline grant figure.
Community Scholars also sits at the intersection of two disclosure streams that global investors read separately: utility community-investment reporting and the corporate philanthropy line in foundation announcements. Here the two converge in a single named program with a fixed per-student figure and an identified academic destination, Troy University in Putnam's case.