Huckabay family donates $2 million for rural medical education

The University of Idaho’s largest endowment in its history was gifted an additional $2 million from the Huckabay family last month to help support its WWAMI Medical Education students.

The Durward and Susan Huckabay Foundation Scholarship Endowment now sits at $14 million with the additional contribution. The scholarship endowment helps fund medical education and training for students in Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho.

Adrienne Fairbanks, an Idaho WWAMI student and mother of four, said she first decided to pursue medicine because of her experience caring for her grandmother in her teenage years, and later work in public health.

The Huckabay scholarship helps her pursue those goals, she said.

“One thing I felt lacking was being able to help and connect with others on an individual level. This ultimately drove me to jump in and pursue my dream in medicine,” she said.

John Huckabay said though he barely knew his grandfather before he passed, Durward Huckabay was well-known for his passion for caring for rural and underserved communities, which is an important part of the WWAMI mission.

That work included treating emancipated, formerly enslaved people in Louisiana after his graduation from the Tulane Medical School, Huckabay wrote. Durward was also known to treat poor patients for free when he moved to Seattle.

The family decided to honor Durward’s legacy by funding a program that helps train the next generation of rural physicians, Huckabay said.

“It was obvious that my Grandfather was very focused on rural and general care of populations that were underserved or marginalized,” he said.

Idaho also ranks lowest for its physicians per capita, and roughly 20% of the nation’s population lives in a rural area while only about 9% of physicians practice in rural communities.

Huckabay said he hopes the endowment can help to change that.

“Our hope is that if an Idaho medical student finds that a scholarship made their life easier down the road, they will be able to consider putting their training to use to provide care to an underserved population,” Huckabay said.