Lucy Cavendish has launched two student bursaries, the College announced this week (12/05).

Two separate donations have been made to the College for mature female students, together worth £30,000. The donations will fund the bursaries, one for a British-Bangladeshi student and one for a STEM student.

The Iqbal Bros Foundation, a Manchester-based Healthcare, Sanitation & Education NGO, has made a donation of £10,000 to the College. The new Iqbal Studentship will support British-Bangladeshi students, with a college panel selecting one recipient from all self-nominated offer-holders following exam results this summer. It will provide student maintenance costs over the course of a three-year undergraduate degree. 

In a statement on the Lucy Cavendish website, Iqbal Ahmed OBE, Chair of the Iqbal Bros Foundation says: “I was born and brought up in a rural village in Sylhet, Bangladesh where I finished my primary and secondary education. The liberation war in 1971 between East and West Pakistan forced my family to flee to the UK.  Education is very important to me and something that I have always valued."

He continued, “I dreamt of going to an educational institution such as Cambridge and the fact that I have been privileged, as a result of working hard, to support Lucy Cavendish has given me a great sense of pride and achievement.”

The College has also received a legacy gift of £20,000 from the Fairway Trust, the final installment from Lady Grantchester , who had been a benefactor of the College from the late 1970s. 

This will fund the Betty Grantchester Studentship, a one-off grant of £5,000 to a first-year female undergraduate student studying a STEM subject, to be repeated for the next three years. All eligible offer-holders to the College will be automatically considered. 

The College recalls that Lady Grantchester "treasured" her association with Lucy Cavendish, and  believed that education was "the key to helping young people improve their life prospects".