Like any good upper middle-class white collar Midwestern city my hometown of Brighton Michigan had a foundation and that foundation offered a college scholarship annually.
Also, like any Midwestern city, it was almost exclusively, old, rich, white guys, which ran the entire scholarship program who awarded the scholarship to people that were most likely to become like them in a few decades.
For some strange reason, I was asked to be part of the committee who ran the scholarship program that year. That's likely because they wanted connections to local students that I had as well as to portray some level of diversity. I'm a pretty poor choice for showing off diversity. I'm a white college educated dude and at the time I wasn't Rich nor was I old but I was definitely on track to be both of those.
Of course, all of the candidates that I advocated for where the atypical individuals who had a personal story and narrative that didn't align with the high school sport, playing extracurricular, achieving college, hopeful, that most of the board members wanted to see when the money.