Kent DuPont is generously supporting Yale High School through the Kent George DuPont Family Heritage Fund at the Community Foundation.

“We are truly blessed to have such benevolence in our midst,” said Ken Nicholl, Superintendent for Yale Public Schools.

Kent and his late wife, the former Sandra Barth, have long ties to the Yale and Old Brockway area. The Kent George DuPont Family Heritage Fund will provide a grant each year to Yale High School for non-sports related extracurricular programs. The Fund will support after school activities at the high school such as robotics, arts and foreign language clubs, the high school band and more.

“We are so pleased that the Community Foundation could administer this fund for the benefit of the Yale High School academic after school programs,” said Elicia DuPont Henderson, daughter of Kent DuPont. “These programs are so important for the students’ life experiences, to broaden their horizons, develop talents and skills.”

Although Mr. DuPont is new to the Community Foundation, he and his family are not new to philanthropy, having made numerous charitable gifts in Lapeer, Michigan and elsewhere over the years. After considerable research, Kent and his daughter Elicia found that the Community Foundation with its deep ties to the St Clair County community was the right vehicle to use to administer the significant gift of stock and qualified charitable contributions eventually totaling $450,000. The fund will be distributed over at least the next ten years. For the spring semester the fund will disburse about $15,000 for the students’ use.

“The generosity of Mr. DuPont is truly outstanding, we could not have dreamed of this opportunity for our youth.” said Nicholl.

When funding for education and schools is tenuous at best, generous donations like that of the DuPont family help provide opportunities for students that they would otherwise not be able to experience, explained Nicholl. School districts have been provided the task of doing “more with less”. Donations and grants help fill the void and assist in bridging the gap so that local kids may truly have enhanced opportunities for learning, growing and enriching experiences.

Supporting students that are working so hard and are also trying to expand their horizons through extracurricular activities such as robotics and the arts was important to the family. Mr. DuPont wanted to be able to provide a funding boost to these programs so that annual fundraising was not such a burden and to potentially make some field trips, like a trip to the DIA in Detroit that would normally be out of reach, available to the kids.

Kent and Sandra DuPont lived most of their 64 years of married life in the Lapeer, Michigan area where they raised their family and operated the DuPont-Lapeer Airport and a branch of the G. B. DuPont Co., Inc., a manufacturer of cold headed products for the auto industry. Kent was the president of the company, founded by his parents in 1939, for 20 years.

Family ties to the area are deep. The first member of the family to move to the Yale-Brockway-Greenwood area was William Shannon in 1850 who worked as a timber cruiser and later owned a farm in the Brockway area. Sandra’s great-grandfathers John Newell and James Keys immigrated to the area in the mid 1870’s. All owned farms near each other in Old Brockway. Investing in an area that is so rich in family history is very meaningful to Kent, his daughters, his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren.

Education has always been an important value to the DuPont family and it is a value nurtured in previous generations of their family who were residents of the Yale and Old Brockway areas. Generations of the family have proven experiences that education and horizon broadening experiences, like those found in extracurricular activities, are keys to a successful life for all the family.

The Community Foundation is proud to have a track record of helping donors for the past 76 years give back to their hometowns in ways most meaningful to them. Whether it’s significant lifetime gifts or planned gifts through an estate, the donor relations team at the Foundation is ready to help donors confidentially make the most of their charitable giving.