Mission Scholarship Program Dedicated to Kesha Young

From left standing: Monroe Gilmour, LaVerne Glover, Randall Richardson, and Joe Damore, Mission President and CEO. Seated are Scholarship recipients McKay Mullen, Krystle Joyner, and Ebony Joyner. The students were all interns at Mission this past summer.

The Mission Health and Hospitals scholarship program that has given half a million dollars to area students has been dedicated to the memory of a young woman whose vibrant spirit outshone her many disabilities.

Kesha Young was born with serious disabilities and medical problems. Soon after she became one of the first residents of the Irene Wortham Center, then-Mission employee LaVerne Glover found out about the smiling preschooler who was there with no family to go to. LaVerne became Kesha’s guardian, and Kesha became part of the Glover family.



“She
was in pain all of the time, but she was always the life of the party,”
LaVerne Glover said. “She could only say a few words, but she
understood everything.”


“They were
wonderful to her at the Irene Wortham Center, and in the PEP program,”
Glover said. “She got to go places and do things my other children
didn’t even get to do.”


The scholarship
now named in her honor has been given each year for the past decade.
Mission Health awards scholarships of $1,000 each to 50 students who
are planning careers in health care. It was established to assist
Mission and the community with the development of a larger pool of
diverse professionals prepared for careers in all aspects of health
care delivery.


For information about Mission’s scholarship program, call Randall Richardson, Mission Diversity Officer, at 213-1195.