The Sam & Mary Swidey Finish Line Fund

The Sam & Mary Swidey Finish Line Fund

Your contribution helps students surmount their final college hurdle.

Because of mounting loans and diminishing aid, students often find that they need additional financial support to get over the last hump standing between them and their degree. The Sam & Mary Swidey Finish Line Fund assists Alray Scholars who have shown themselves to be responsible students and committed mentees, but who need some extra financial help in their last year of college.

Donate to the Finish Line Fund

About Sam and Mary

In their decades as pioneering educators, Sam and Mary Swidey specialized in being able to reach young people who had been written off by others. Sam did this as a classroom teacher, as founder of a Head-Start-type program called the “School for the Not Readies,” and as a school principal who played John Lennon’s “Imagine” on the PA system in between classes. For the final quarter-century of his career, he worked as a high school adjustment counselor, helping troubled students find their way, co-founding a gang prevention and intervention program, and working to heal fractured families.

Mary did her innovative work with nontraditional students as a longtime professor of reading at Bristol Community College and director of an inventive Reading Lab. She also taught English as a Second Language courses to students from around the globe. When she led an ESL program for adult immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, she welcomed her students and their children into her home for celebrations with her family. She set high standards for all her students while being incredibly supportive, and they loved her for it.

Sam and Mary played crucial roles in the creation and growth of the Alray Scholars Program, both as sources of inspiration for their son Neil to found the organization and as passionate supporters who formed warm connections with the scholars and their families.

This fund is named in their memory in recognition for their remarkable service to the organization, the generous donations that so many friends and family made in their honor, and the commitment that Mary and Sam shared to help promising students unlock their full potential.

(Read Sam’s obituary here, and Mary’s here.)

Sam Swidey (R) and wife, Mary, and their son, Neil, join Boston Public School graduates Lamar Brathwaite and Jason White at the 2008 book launch party for The Assist, where the creation of the Alray Scholars Program was announced. Brathwaite and White were two of the students whose lives Neil chronicled in the book.

“This program beautifully represents the values that guided Sam in his life’s work. I know he’ll be looking down on the scholars with pride and affection.”

Mary Swidey

Sam's wife of nearly 51 years. The Finish Line Fund was named for Sam after his passing in 2014, and then, after Mary's passing in 2021, was renamed in memory of both of them.

Special Recognition

In addition to receiving the extra financial support they need to graduate and their degree, a select few of our scholars receive the additional distinction of being named a Sam & Mary Swidey Finish Line Fund Scholar. Announced each year during our Alray Scholars Brunch, this award is reserved for those students who have been extraordinary members of the Alray family, both in overcoming especially high hurdles and in giving back to the Alray community.

Congratulations to these deserving recipients.

Donate to the Finish Line Fund