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Cummings Foundation, Inc. (CFI) developed the McKeown Scholars Program in 1996, in memory of James L. McKeown, late president of Cummings Properties and former managing trustee of the Foundation, who died suddenly in 1996 at the age of 41. The Foundation has awarded $1,931,000 million in scholarship awards in Mr. McKeown's honor.

Mr. McKeown was a well known business leader, widely respected for his outstanding professional expertise, as well as his unwavering integrity, compassion, and far-reaching desire to provide opportunities to others, particularly young people. He left his wife, Denise, and two very young daughters, Kelly and Molly.

A Woburn native and graduate of Woburn High School, Salem State College, and University of Vermont, Mr. McKeown also studied at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and had lectured at Massachusetts Center for Continuing Legal Education. He was a marathon runner, competitive swimmer, bicyclist, golfer, and tennis player.

Spending his entire working career with Cummings Properties, Mr. McKeown maintained many community roles, including service as a member and treasurer of Woburn Industrial Development Finance Authority and president of Woburn Business Association. He was once selected as "Boy of the Year" at what is now Woburn Boys and Girls Club. Closely associated with that organization nearly all his life, he went on to become the first-ever Boys and Girls Club alumnus to be elected a director, and then served two terms as its youngest president, as well.

Eligibility and selection criteria for the McKeown Scholars Program represent qualities, values and achievements Mr. McKeown embodied and would most likely have considered himself in determining award recipients. Some of these criteria include scholarship, excellent writing ability, community service, reputation for fairness and integrity, and a demonstrated concern for helping others.

Currently, the McKeown Scholars Program attempts to recognize the very top high school graduate in Woburn, where CFI has its most significant interests, and in Winchester, where it has its origins. To be considered as potential McKeown Scholars, candidates must be in the upper 20 percent of their graduating class, and must then write a 500-word essay under exam conditions on a subject that is first announced at the hour of the essay competition.

In addition to the McKeown Scholars Program, Cummings Foundation, Inc. now makes lump sum donations to the annual high school scholarship campaigns in communities where it owns substantial properties or has other special interests. These funds are then disbursed at the individual communities' discretion, based on students' merit and/or financial need, as applicable.

The Foundation's scholarship program was directly designed to focus extra community attention on improving the writing ability of local area students. In that regard, its interests closely parallel the business strategy of Cummings Properties, which for decades has placed a very heavy emphasis on hiring people with outstanding writing ability, and then helping them to further improve it.

Every year since 1973, for example, Cummings Properties has routinely required all applicants for any management-level position to complete a standard written editing exercise. The results of these exercises then weigh heavily in all hiring decisions. The company has also routinely brought in outside writing instructors to work with employees of all levels in regular after-hours writing clinics.

This is not at all unlike the "enlightened self interest" policies so famously promoted by United Shoe Machinery Corporation, Cummings Properties' predecessor in Beverly, a hundred years ago. Like USMC, the Foundation strongly supports the notion that it can positively affect the education level of the area's workforce, simultaneously helping it and its 1,800 tenant firms to be more competitive.

Congratulations to all previous McKeown Scholars, whose names can be accessed below. As part of their selection process, each student was required to write an essay under exam conditions, on a subject not revealed to the competing students until the start of the one-hour writing period.

The subjects for the 16th essay competition were as follows:

In Woburn -

"In a speech several years ago, United States Attorney General Eric Holder observed that while the workplace is largely integrated, Americans still self-segregate on the weekends and in their private lives. Holder stated, ‘Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.’ Do you agree or disagree with the attorney general and why?”

In Winchester -

"Do you believe there is a generation gap? Describe the differences between your generation and others."