Three areas of giving are being prepared for the grant’s launch. Each one answers a specific obstacle its founder met in his own career, worked around, or watched other people fail to clear. None of them is open for application yet.
Area I — Education Grants
Direct financial grants to students of law, finance, economics, and the capital markets: tuition first, with books, fees, and examination costs considered case by case. Particular attention is intended for first-generation students and for students whose studies cross borders — the two groups whose talent most reliably outruns their introductions.
Three named award families are planned within this area:
- The Altahawi Award in Law — for law students, honoring the profession he entered on his admission to the bar in 1988.
- The Adamson Brothers Award in Finance — for students of finance and the capital markets, named for the investment bank he founded and led. See Investment Banking History.
- The Cross-Border Scholar Award — for students working across legal systems and markets, as the founder’s own practice has for four decades.
Area II — Legal Access Grants
Operating support for legal aid clinics, pro bono programs, and law-school clinical education — the parts of the legal system where a person who cannot afford a lawyer still gets one. Planned support includes clinic staffing, case-cost funds, and the unglamorous overhead that grant-makers routinely refuse to cover and that clinics routinely close for want of.
A career built inside the law carries an obvious debt to the parts of it that operate without a fee. This area is the payment on it.
Area III — Opportunity & Enterprise Grants
Program support for financial literacy, entrepreneurship training, and small-enterprise development in communities that never come near a capital market: what capital actually is, how it is raised, what it costs, and how a business is built to survive the answer. The founder has spent four decades on the supply side of capital; this area is about the demand side, where the education is thinnest and the consequences of not having it are heaviest.
How awards are intended to work
- Published criteria. Eligibility and selection standards will be posted here before any application opens.
- Independent review. Each award will pass through a review step the founder does not control alone.
- Paid directly where possible. Education grants are intended to be paid to the institution against a student’s account, not disbursed as cash.
- Reported publicly. What was given, in what amount, and to whom — published annually.
Introducing yourself now
No application is open, and nothing submitted through this site is an application or creates any expectation of an award. Students, universities, clinics, and community programs are nonetheless welcome to introduce themselves ahead of formation. It costs nothing to be on the list of people who hear first.