The RBO Scholarship Program Through The Years

2023 Scholarships

At the end of our Spring 2023 season, we celebrated 7 high school seniors and 6 alumni that earned scholarships through RBO! Watching from the crowd as our coaches spoke about the incredible accomplishments of each runner was a fantastic reminder of the transformational impact that dedicated coaching, meaningful athletic opportunities, and a community of support can have on young people. Thanks to the generous contributions of our supporters, RBO was able to distribute more than $20,000 to graduating seniors and RBO alumni this year. Please join us in congratulating Brian Arellano, Jason Arellano, Ket Buhler, XiaoFeng Lin, Anlisa Liu, Diego Perez, and Juan Perez on receiving Senior Scholarships! Also please join us in congratulating Chun Huang, Daniel Morga, Rubi Morga, Yareli Morga, Chris Ramirez, Luis Orlando SanJuan, and Alex Velasco on receiving Alumni Scholarships! Thank you to all of the family, friends, and community members who joined us at Snow Park to help celebrate our 2023 award recipients!

Click Here to check out more photos from our 2023 Scholarship Ceremony!

2022 Scholarships

Congratulations to our 9 graduating seniors! This year, we awarded $24,600 in scholarships to our seniors, as well as to 4 RBO alumni. We celebrated with our first in-person scholarship ceremony in 2 years! Surrounded by their family, coaches, and members of the RBO board, our seniors were handed their giant checks and shared a few words about their time with RBO. We are so proud of each and every one of them, and wish them success as they embark on their next chapter!

This fall, our seniors are headed off to fantastic schools and opportunities- UC Berkeley, UC Merced, UCLA, College of Alameda, Laney College and The Marines to name a few.

Congratulations to Christus, Alex, SongXi, Wilder, Daniel, Yarely, Liyah, Priya, and Clark!

See more photos of our seniors and alumni at their Scholarship Ceremony here.

2021 Scholarships

This year, RBO gave out a total of $22,800 in scholarships. We awarded $21,100 total to 11 high school seniors–who all completed the Bay Race Three Bridge Challenge this year–and $1,700 total to 2 RBO alumni awardees. We celebrated all 13 recipients at a Zoom ceremony Sunday afternoon. We wish all of our winners success and thank them for their many years of participation in RBO. We can't wait to see what they do next (and look forward to them returning as blue shirt volunteers!). Congrats to all!

Read about our 2021 seniors in Local News Matters and check out the Google Slides from our scholarship ceremony for more photos and quotes.

We'd also like to thank two RBO alumni who we were able to award and recognize at this year's ceremony as 2021 alumni scholarship winners.

2020 Scholarships

Although we had to cut our season short due to COVID-19, we still wanted to award our graduating seniors with scholarships celebrating their hard work and dedication to RBO over the years. This would have been RBO's 10th year running the Oakland Running Festival, and we're so sad that our seniors didn't have a chance to run the half marathon before leaving for college. During this unprecedented time, we wanted to support our seniors as much as possible.

2020 is the fourth year of the RBO scholarship program and we are awarding more seniors than ever! This year, we awarded 10 seniors with $17,100 total in RBO scholarships. These seniors have exemplified RBO's principles of hard work, dedication, goal setting, perseverance, ambition, and community. To honor our seniors, we held two virtual scholarship ceremonies. Congratulations to Vilma, German, Walter, Lucia, Axel, Chun, Christine, Nick, Luis, and Elena!

Read about our 2020 seniors and RBO’s scholarship program in Local News Matters and SF Gate.

You can watch some videos from our scholarship ceremonies below:

And in other good news, we raised enough money to offer 5 RBO scholarship alumni gifts of $500 each! Congratulations to Paul (2018 grad), Trisha (2019 grad), Yazmin (2019 grad), Alejandro (2019 grad), and Cory (2019 grad)! We thank these alumni for their continued involvement with RBO.

Read about our 2020 seniors and RBO’s scholarship program in Local News Matters and SF Gate.

2019 Scholarships

Here comes the amazing crew of scholarship recipients for the third year! Wishing them all a successful life after high school wherever they decided to go! Congrats to Alejandro, Ariana, Cory, Trisha, and Yazmin!

2018 Scholarships

We here at RBO cannot explain how EXCITED we were to present our second round of  scholarships to 8 RBO Seniors at the end of the 2018 Spring Season! We wish our best to all our scholarship recipients: Andria, Naomi, Alan, Angelo, Carlos, Jonathan, Jessie, and Sergio.

2017 Scholarships

Julia Zhang (Iowa State) and Mason Emura (CSU Monterey) each received $750 checks. Paul Mei applied later in the summer after deciding to join Notre Dame de Namur and the Board was happy to grant him a scholarship too.

Thank you to Pat Der (pictured with Julia and found Tod Vedock) for fundraising specifically to provide RBO first scholarship. Mason was presented with his check by executive director Nancy Phillippine & Tod Vedock.

Julia 

"I love how RBO, unlike many other running groups, has a warm, supportive, and encouraging atmosphere. It makes a difference when nobody is left behind, no matter how slow one is."

"One of the times when I felt the course of my life redefined was when I heard Pat Der declare that he would run ten times around the lake, and that he would donate proceeds to charity. Hearing his declaration to run 30 miles made me see how many people do things purely from the goodness from their heart."

"The most meaningful experience I had was being partnered with Amanda as my running mentor. Not only is she an expert marathon runner, but also we really clicked. From her I grasped how I could help my community. "

Mason 

"I remember having many challenging moments in RBO. I remember my first 5K practice. I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be at home sleeping. Instead I was out running. As I started my first warmup, I looked back apprehensively at my dad wondering how I got myself into this. I remember struggling during stair day. I remember being very scared for my first 5K. But as I did more 5Ks I realized they were pretty easy. "

"From training for the half marathon, I definitely learned to push myself and to never give up."

"RBO has truly changed my life for the better. I’ve made so many friends, including my mentor Astha. I have become much healthier as well. Running has also helped me mentally.  It helps me clear my mind and feel focused. It helps me release a lot of my energy."

"I definitely plan to keep running after I leave RBO."

Paul 

"RBO Mentors taught me to pace myself so that I don't die in the half marathon. Running with RBO has taught me that I can achieve my goals if I have confidence in myself."

I think the most difficult time I had in RBO was on the day of training when I ran 11 miles with my mentor Kyrah. It was a smooth run until the last 2 miles. I thought that it would be a good idea to push my limits on the last few miles. Before I knew it, Kyrah and I were racing back to the finish line. It was really difficult but I kept pushing myself because I didn't want to lose. As hard as this experience was I would do it again because of the rush I felt while racing and the feeling of accomplishment afterwards. It was really fun having someone really fast to run with because it motivated me to push myself."

"As I move on towards college, I plan on returning to RBO as a volunteer"