Unfortunate, But True

Over the years, we have recognized an unfortunate fact:  a woman will appreciate the retreat more if she has made a personal investment in order to attend.

We used to go to great lengths to provide scholarships to women who couldn’t afford the expense of a retreat. If we had the means, we provided full scholarships for them to attend the retreat. Over the years, however, we observed that those women who were given full scholarships were the ones more likely to let a minor difficulty or hindrance keep them from attending the retreat, while those who had made a monetary sacrifice to attend the retreat made more of an effort to come, despite difficulties.

As a result of this observation, we made a change to our scholarship policy.  While we still want to provide financial help to those without the means to attend our retreat, we provide this help in the form of partial scholarships.  As a general rule, we now require that those who have expressed the need for scholarship help make some amount of personal investment–by paying whatever they can afford, or, at the very least, paying the non-refundable deposit.