.jpg "Thomas G. Hanley gift")
Local Trust Makes Major Donation to UMES HRM Students
PRINCESS ANNE, MD (Sept. 16, 2010) – University of Maryland Eastern Shore students who want to work in the hospitality industry have a friend in the Thomas G. Hanley Trust.
The UMES Foundation recently received a $250,000 gift from the trust based in Ocean City, Md. The money will be used to underwrite expenses and travel for students pursuing a degree in Hotel and Restaurant Management.
Winston M. Trader manages the Hanley trust for his late uncle, a Worcester County businessman and philanthropist who dabbled as a hotelier. Trader once worked as a bellhop at Hanley’s Ocean Lodge in Ocean City.
When Trader read about UMES’ hospitality program earning national accreditation, he decided the Hanley trust should invest in educating future workers in the industry locally.
“I thought ‘That’s something local’,” Trader said. “It makes more sense than to send it up to New York,” home of an Ivy League school of hotel administration.
Hanley was known in the Milford and Middletown, Del. areas as a savvy businessman who bought and managed profitable properties. A community flagpole in Milford is named in his honor.
The gift comes at an opportune time because the university is in the final year of raising $14 million to support and expand its academic mission as a land-grant institution. UMES leaders were pleasantly surprised to be contacted by Trader.
“This is certainly a welcome donation,” President Thelma B. Thompson said. “I’m deeply appreciative of people like Mr. Trader, who look closely at what we do and want to support us.”
Dr. Ernest Boger, the Hotel Restaurant Management department chairman, calls the Hanley gift “a validation of the importance of program accreditation since we came to (Mr. Trader’s) attention via a media highlight of that accomplishment.”
The gift “will permit us to provide a level of student enrichment and external industry professional involvement,” Boger said, “that has been … restricted due to funding limitations.”
The gift will be placed in a designated scholarship account named in Hanley’s honor, which Trader said he hopes will memorialize his uncle in perpetuity. Hanley died in 1982.
UMES’s hospitality program operates from the Richard A. Henson Conference Center, a facility that includes classrooms, banquet facilities and an on-campus hotel where students get hands-on lessons.
The 200 undergraduates enrolled in the program can choose from a variety of hospitality specialties to study culinary arts, restaurant management, food and beverage management, hotel administration, golf management and travel/tourism management.
UMES is one of 54 institutions recognized by the Accreditation Commission for Programs in Hospitality Administration, joining Purdue, Oklahoma State and the University of South Carolina among others.
UMES graduates work for such industry giants as Marriott and Hyatt hotels, T.G.I. Friday’s and Red Lobster restaurants, Sodexo, Aramark and Walt Disney.
For more information about UMES’ HRM degree program, call 410-651-6563, or visit www.umes.edu/hrm online.
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Bill Robinson, director, UMES Office of Public Relations, 410-621-2355, wrobinson3@umes.edu.
Gail Stephens, assistant director, UMES Office of Public Relations, 410-651-7580, gcstephens@umes.edu.
Dr. Thelma B. Thompson, president of the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, accepts a major donation for students in the Hotel and Restaurant Management program from Winston Trader, representing the Thomas G. Hanley Trust. From left to right are: Dr. Ernest Boger, chair of the Department of Hotel and Restaurant Management; Trader; Thompson; Wilma Trader and Dr. Ayodele Alade, dean of the School of Business and Technology.