When people create a student scholarship, they may begin with a practical question: Who needs help, and how much?
But a scholarship is rarely only about finances. It can carry a family’s history, values and belief in what education makes possible. Often, it reflects the memory of someone who once received help and chose to extend it to others.
For Bradley and Rachel Wellons, the Dr. Kennard W. and Pat B. Wellons Scholarship at the University of Kentucky College of Social Work honors Brad’s parents, two social workers whose lives were shaped by education and the support of others and who devoted their careers to giving back.
College was neither easy nor assumed for Pat or Kennard. Pat relied on financial support from her siblings. Kennard’s path included service in the U.S. Air Force, the GI Bill and experiences that transformed how he understood people, systems and justice.
The scholarship bearing their names honors both the support that shaped them and the service that became central to their lives.
“My parents were lucky, and they knew that,” Brad said. “They believed in service and in paying it forward, and that kind of perspective has really shaped me and encouraged me and Rachel to start this scholarship.”
Brad remembers his father as one of the kindest people he has known – empathetic, generous and instinctively drawn to those who needed encouragement. A story from Kennard’s childhood captured that spirit. Each week, his father gave the children a silver dollar. One sibling saved every coin and eventually bought an airplane; another gave every coin away. Kennard spent his on his friends.
“If he was ever going to get something good, he was going to share it with his friends,” Brad said.
That instinct followed Kennard into the classroom. As a professor, he paid particular attention to students who needed encouragement, including those from low-income backgrounds and those still learning to see themselves in the academy.
“He loved being a teacher,” Brad said. “And his students loved him.”
After earning his Doctor of Social Welfare from the University of California, Berkeley, Kennard taught at Arizona State University and UC Berkeley before joining UK, where he spent 30 years as a faculty member. His academic work focused on human behavior, statistical methods in social work research and gerontology. He also held connections with sociology and the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging.
“He really helped pave a way for statistical methods and population-level thinking in social work education,” Brad said. “I remember him being very concerned about the ways that the demographic changes of his day were going to impact families, service and communities.”
Kennard was interested not only in individual lives but also in the forces shaping them.
“He was always thinking about what people were going through,” Brad said. “He had the unique ability to see statistics as real people with real circumstances, not just predictions or numbers.”
Pat Wellons was fierce, disciplined, independent and profoundly committed to her clients. Before choosing social work, she considered ministry. She loved the Baptist church, its music and its sense of shared purpose. At a time when women faced limited pathways into religious leadership, social work offered another way to serve and build a career on her own terms.
Pat was among the first women in Kentucky to become a licensed clinical social worker. She later served as president of the Kentucky Society for Clinical Social Work and helped advance the legislative changes that established social work licensure in Kentucky in 1974. She also served as president of the National Clinical Social Work Association.
She built a private practice, established her own business, purchased her own building and continued practicing until her death in 2018 at age 81. Licensed from 1974 to 2018, she practiced for 44 years, making her one of Kentucky’s longest-tenured licensed clinical social workers.
“Her patients were everything to her,” Brad said.
Her work combined compassion with discipline. She understood boundaries, family systems and the complexity of pain. Brad said she was especially gifted in working with adolescents and families navigating trauma, and she mentored and supervised many social workers entering clinical practice.
Together, Pat and Kennard represented two expressions of social work. Pat helped people heal during some of their most difficult moments. Kennard taught, studied systems and prepared others to serve.
Their belief that people are shaped by circumstances, systems, opportunities and support is central to the scholarship Brad and Rachel established in their honor.
Now living in New Orleans, Brad and Rachel did not design the scholarship around geography or a narrowly defined profile. Instead, they wanted it to help students who have worked hard, encountered barriers and need support to take the next step in their education.
“I picture it as a catalyst,” Rachel said. “We want to support students who faced barriers and simply need someone to help make the next step possible.”
At its best, they see the scholarship as an intervention in a story still being written.
“We have both been so fortunate to have others ‘lend the ladder down,’” Rachel said. “We want to pay it forward in that same way.”
Although neither Brad nor Rachel is a social worker, their careers reflect many of the same commitments: service, education, systems change and the belief that people need support to move forward.
Rachel is a professor of physical therapy and a leader in vestibular rehabilitation, a specialty addressing dizziness, vertigo and balance issues often connected to inner-ear or neurological disorders. A board-certified clinical specialist in neurologic physical therapy, she has served as chair of the Vestibular Special Interest Group within the Academy of Neurologic Physical Therapy, part of the American Physical Therapy Association.
Her work centers on students and patients. In both settings, the goal is not simply to teach or treat but to help someone regain confidence in what is possible.
Rachel traces her understanding of service to family, education and the communities where she has lived and worked. At the Jesuit university she attended, she remembers seeing a phrase displayed in a service building: “To whom much is given, much is expected.”
Those words became a thread running through her life.
Brad’s career has centered on service through public policy, public health and tobacco prevention. He is drawn to policy, systems and environmental change because of the scale at which they can improve lives.
Their careers help explain the scholarship. Both have chosen work focused on what people need to move forward. Both have built careers around education, repair and possibility. And both understand that help can echo long after the first act of giving.
For Brad and Rachel, the scholarship is also an expression of gratitude. It reflects their belief that having enough creates a responsibility to share and that resources from one generation can open doors for the next.
“We are investing in the future,” Rachel said. “At some point, there is enough, and you need to be able to share in your good fortune.”
The Dr. Kennard W. and Pat B. Wellons Scholarship carries more than the family name. It honors two social workers who understood that education could alter the course of a life. It also reflects Brad and Rachel’s belief that giving is a way to extend opportunity to future social workers who may one day do the same for others.
For the student who receives the scholarship, they hope the message is clear: Someone believes in them.
“College is hard,” Brad said. “If you are not getting that support from your community, it can be really hard. We want students to know that we believe in them and want to support them.”
Years from now, Brad hopes the scholarship will have done more than ease the financial burden of a degree. He hopes it will carry forward his parents’ legacy in the place that shaped so much of their family’s story.
It is both a memorial and a promise: a way to honor two lives of service, share what was given and help future social workers begin.
Individuals who may wish to contribute to the Dr. Kennard W. and Pat B. Welllons Endowed Scholarship fund may visit this link.