Marguerite Marcelin Hastings Memorial Scholarship Fund

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” David Hastings knows this. He learned it from his mother, Marguerite, and honors her with this scholarship fund. 

Marguerite did not have the opportunity to finish school. Within a year after her 16th birthday, her younger sister died, her father died of long-term exposure to mustard gas in the trenches of Verdun in World War I, and Nazi Germany invaded and occupied her country, France, at the onset of World War II. For four years, until liberated by the Allied troops, she helped her mother run the family café and raise her siblings while under the brutal oppression of the Nazis.

At the end of WWII, she met and married an American soldier, Charles Hastings, and later immigrated to the United States with their young daughter. The Hastings family grew to four children to which Marguerite was a full-time mother. She volunteered for all manner of worthy causes. 

Marguerite never achieved her own educational goals. She did not want this same fate for her children.  According to David, she sent a clear message that education was a critical part of success. He earned a degree in Information Technologies. He thanks his mother for this and, to keep her memory alive, created this scholarship fund to support students in business, information technology and accounting at Marion Technical College.