Dan Newsom

White County Single Parent Scholarship Fund director honored

Dan Newsom of Searcy leads the White County Single Parent Scholarship Fund, which was named Nonprofit of the Year by the Searcy Regional Chamber of Commerce. Newsom’s eclectic career also includes being a radio DJ for two years and having a 30-year career with the Social Security Administration.
Dan Newsom of Searcy leads the White County Single Parent Scholarship Fund, which was named Nonprofit of the Year by the Searcy Regional Chamber of Commerce. Newsom’s eclectic career also includes being a radio DJ for two years and having a 30-year career with the Social Security Administration.

Dan Newsom was a little bit rusty at job interviews — he hadn’t been to one in 36 years — when he prayed for God to lead him to a second career helping people.

“I learned God doesn’t answer prayers halfway,” he said, and he laughed.

Newsom, 67, has been executive director of the White County Single Parent Scholarship Fund for almost 10 years. It is celebrating its 20th year in existence.

“This is the neatest thing. … Through this fall, we’ve now awarded 674 scholarships with a value of $410,324. It’s just amazing, and that’s all here in White County,” he said. “Most of the money is privately raised; that’s part of my job.”

The organization’s success hasn’t gone unnoticed. The White County Single Parent Scholarship Fund was named Nonprofit of the Year on Oct. 29 by the Searcy Regional Chamber of Commerce.

“That was quite a surprise, but we are very, very grateful for that; it was very exciting,” Newsom said. “We are very thankful to be part of the chamber.”

Jennifer Skinner, the Searcy chamber’s public-relations coordinator, said, “They don’t get enough recognition for all that they’ve done. They’ve given out so many scholarships to single parents; it’s definitely a worthy award.”

Newsom, a Paragould native, thought his first 30-year career with the Social Security Administration would be his one and only. He attended Crowley’s Ridge College in Paragould (then a junior college), before transferring to Harding University in Searcy, where he majored in history and met his now wife, Barbara, and reconsidered his career plans.

“Originally, I had planned to be an attorney, but in the Watergate era, I got disenchanted with that,” he said.

Newsom attended a Harding University federal-government career day and talked with a representative of the Social Security Administration. He decided to pursue a position with the SSA, but he had to be willing to take a job within a five-state area. He was given a list of job openings.

“I listed my top five, and Jonesboro was my first choice, and I got it,” he said. He worked in the northeast-Arkansas city for six years and was promoted to operations supervisor in Conway in 1980.

“I got to watch Scottie Pippen play basketball for the UCA Bears; that was a lot of fun,” Newsom said. Pippen later played in the NBA.

In 1987, Newsom had the opportunity to transfer to Searcy, and he retired there in 2007 as Searcy’s district manager with the Social Security Administration.

Newsom said he thoroughly enjoyed his career.

“I’ve always considered my work with SSA as a ministry because it’s basically a people-helping business,” he said. “You deal with people who may have lost a loved one and don’t know how they’ll carry on, or maybe someone is disabled … or they’re approaching retirement and have a little bit of anxiety. That was an opportunity every day to help somebody.”

He said people come up and say, “You probably don’t remember me, but you helped me, and I just want to say thank you.”

That’s important to Newsom, who said that what he learned from several of his teachers was, “It’s important to be a servant.”

After he retired, he started volunteering with several organizations. Newsom, whose sister died by suicide in 2003, spent several years on the board of the Dr. Robert Elliott Foundation, which works to promote suicide-prevention awareness “shining a light on the disease of depression.”

When Newsom finds out someone has had a loved one die by suicide, he gets materials from the foundation to give them.

“I try to minister to them in some way, help in some way,” he said.

He also began serving the College Church of Christ in Searcy as an elder before he retired and took a sabbatical, and when he retired from the SSA, he became an elder again. He’s also vice chairman of the Crowley’s Ridge College Board of Directors. He served in the Kiwanis Club for more than 30 years in Conway and Searcy.

But don’t think for one minute that Newsom is buttoned-up and boring.

Newsom plays guitar in a group called Recycled Strings. The retired men (except for Newsom) go once a month to Harding Place, a retirement home, to play.

“I love to play ’60s music … but I have gotten into old-time country lately,” he said.

But his all-time favorite band is The Beatles.

“I’ve been a fan of The Beatles since Feb. 9, 1964, when they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show,” Newsom said.

He tools around town in a white Honda Accord with the license plate Beatl5.

“I think it fits in with The White Album very well,” he said.

For two years, from 2008-2010, Newsom was a volunteer DJ on the Harding University radio station, KVHU 95.3.

Each week, he produced and hosted two hour-long radio programs. One was Music of the British Invasion, on which he played The Beatles, his favorite; as well as Herman’s Hermits, the Kinks, The Who and others.

“I would research, and every week, I would focus on one group, or in the case of The Beatles, one album,” he said. One of the highlights of that gig was interviewing Louise Harrison, sister of George Harrison, the lead guitarist for The Beatles.

“I spent an hour with her asking everything I could think of about The Beatles — what it was like to be backstage at The Ed Sullivan Show, what every one was like personally. … It was a lot of fun.”

Newsom said he created four one-hour programs from that interview.

He said the most surprising answer he got was when he asked Harrison why The Beatles broke up. He said popular theories are that Yoko Ono caused the breakup, or drugs — but Harrison said it was simply that the Beatles “grew up.” They got married, had children and lived apart.

“It was just a natural progression,” Newsom said Harrison told him.

Harrison also lamented the fact that she no longer had copies of The Beatles’ movies A Hard Day’s Night, Help and Yellow Submarine. Newsom said he told her she could order those on Amazon, but she didn’t feel comfortable doing that.

“I sent them to her,” he said. For a long time, he didn’t cash the check she sent him. “I got to order three movies for the sister of George Harrison,” he said.

His other radio program was called Old Time Rock and Roll and featured music from the ’50s and ’60s, including Elvis and The Monkees.

“Then I decided I wanted to go back to work,” Newsom said. “I hadn’t interviewed for a job in 36 years. I began to pray for God to show me something I could do to help.”

The answer was printed in a newspaper: He saw an advertisement seeking an executive director for the White County Single Parent Scholarship Fund.

“They’d never had an executive director; they had just always had a volunteer board,” he said. The affiliate in White County started in 1999 through the Bald Knob Rotary Club, which awarded one scholarship for $200.

“It gradually got bigger … and spun off in 2005,” he said. It became a nonprofit organization and is one of the affiliates of the Arkansas Single Parent Scholarship Fund, based in Springdale.

Newsom was hired for the position and began working in the role in February 2010, and the scholarship amounts are now five times bigger than the first one.

“When I started, $650 or $700 scholarships were given; the goal was $1,000 a semester. Now we have reached that level — $1,000 a semester — as long as they’re in school and meet the qualifications,” he said.

“Those include being a resident of White County; maintaining a 2.0 grade-point average; and being a single parent and head of the household with a child younger than 18. They can apply every semester and, hopefully, receive a scholarship until they graduate from the program,” Newsom said.

‘We recognize, and we try to look at this through the eyes of a single parent, that they’re working full time and have at least one or two children,” he said. “They’re going to school and trying to keep everything together.

“One of the neat things about our scholarships is they are so different than traditional scholarships. We allow our students to use that money for anything they need to use it for to be successful.”

That can include using the scholarship for food, clothing, rent, medical or day care expenses, etc.

“Our goal is to help them be successful,” he said.

“The community has been so, so good to the Single Parent Scholarship Fund. We receive some money from grants, have four endowed scholarships, and we have a process every year during the summer through which we raise sponsorships for our fall reception.”

The application deadline for scholarships is Jan. 7 for spring and Aug. 15 for the fall. More information is available at www.aspsf.org, by emailing Newsom at wcspsf.inc@gmail.com, or by calling him at (501) 230-2414.

“It’s just a marvelous, marvelous event,” he said of the reception. “We encourage our students to bring their children so they can see what their parents are working toward.”

He said the scholarships are named for the donors, who are also invited to the receptions to meet the recipients.

“Last month, we awarded 20 scholarships … and all 20 students were there and all 20 donors,” he said. “We had one student come up with tears in her eyes and said, ‘A year ago, I was in a battered women’s shelter, and I never would have believed that a year later, I would be back in school getting my education.’”

Another time, Newsom said, a man came up to him in Walmart and said, “Mr. Newsom, may I show you something?”

He showed Newsom a photo of his daughter and granddaughter. His daughter had gotten a Single Parent Scholarship for four years, had graduated from college and was hired to teach second grade.

“He said, ‘I want to thank y’all for helping my daughter,’” Newsom said.

And experiences like those are why he loves this job, he said.

“It may be a cliché, but you want to leave things better than you found them, and that’s sort of been my philosophy,” Newsom said.

He also believes there’s a Beatles song that applies to every situation.

“If you had told me 12 years ago when I retired from the SSA that I’d be working with the Single Parent Scholarship Fund, I probably would not have believed it, but there’s a line from John Lennon’s song ‘Beautiful Boy’ that fits: ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.’ I think that is so true. I can see God’s hand in it all, and I just feel like I’ve been very blessed,” Newsom said.

Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.

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