Tuscora Park Health and Wellness Foundation announced the Christine Elaine Weigand RN Memorial Scholarship in 2021.
Robert Weigand started the scholarship, housed at TPHWF, to honor his wife’s legacy as a nurse and caregiver.
Christine’s nursing career is best defined by the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, this is to have succeeded.”
Indeed, Christine succeeded. She had always dreamed of being a caregiver for others and through her career as a registered nurse, she would realize this dream, “going the extra mile” for patients and touching the hearts of many.
Christine endured many personal health challenges, including juvenile diabetes and receiving a Life Banc kidney and pancreas transplant in 2006. Despite these challenges, she was an extraordinary clinician. She spent 30 years as an RN working as a charge nurse, preceptor for new RN employees, and as a care manager on the 5100 unit and in the emergency room at Akron General Medical Center (now Cleveland Clinic Akron General).
She was active in NAON (National Association of Orthopedic Nurses) and was honored with an Excellence in Nursing award during Nurses Week in 2002. She actively participated in Life Banc and Meals on Wheels.
The Christine Elaine Weigand RN Memorial Scholarship is meant to help future nurses overcome obstacles and to achieve their dreams. It provides one $2,000 scholarship each school year to a student in an accredited nursing program, who is a graduate of Barberton, Copley, Norton, Wadsworth, Rittman, Chippewa, Kenmore-Garfield, Coventry, Manchester, Northwest, or Green High School.
Robert Weigand hopes recipients will “go the extra mile” just as Christine did. He said, “If everyone went the ‘extra mile’ today, what a wonderful world we would live in.”
For a scholarship application, go online to barbertoncf.org and click on the Tuscora Park Health and Wellness Foundation’s page, or call 330-745-5995.
To make a donation to the scholarship, call 330-745-5995 or mail a check to Barberton Community Foundation at 460 W. Paige Ave. Barberton, OH 44203 make the check payable to the Tuscora Park Health and Wellness Foundation, in the memo specify the donation is made to the Christine Weigand Memorial Scholarship.