What we are
501(c)(3)
A private operating foundation — funding tuition, room and board, books and related supplies.
John C. Dunham built a manufacturing company from a local Aurora shop into a national supplier — and then gave the whole thing back to the place that raised him. The JCD Foundation is what that looks like pointed at eighteen-year-olds.
That’s the short version. Here’s how it happened. ↓Ask the people who knew him and you don't get a resume. You get four things, in this order: he made himself, he outworked everyone, he took care of the people who worked for him, and when he died he gave all of it back.
That last part is the whole reason this foundation exists. It wasn't a marketing gesture or a tax structure — it was the actual end of the story. A man spent a career building something in the Fox Valley and then handed the proceeds back to the Fox Valley.
He was born in New Jersey in 1910 and his family moved to Aurora when he was three. He went through Aurora grade schools and graduated from West Aurora High School in 1928 — band, track, and the drama club, where the yearbook says his friends called him Ham. It's worth sitting with that for a second: the man this foundation is named for graduated from one of the thirteen schools it now funds.
The headline on this page isn't a figure of speech. He started by sweeping the floor of his father's plant, and he stayed close enough to the work that decades later, running the company, he still knew every person in it by name — and they called him John.
The company began as the Thomas Dunham Company, named for John's father, and it made something you would never guess: motorcycle lamps and sidecars. From there it moved into sports bodies for Ford and Chevrolet, and finally into the product it became known for — heavy-duty steel shelving.
In 1931, John was home from college with a new wife and a four-week-old son when his father made him an offer that reads like a challenge, because it was one: if you are man enough to have a wife and a four-week-old son, you are man enough to sell on commission. He took it. Father and son built the steel shelving line together.
John took the business over after the Second World War and pushed it well beyond the automobile industry it had grown up serving. He was president from 1943 to 1973 and chairman until 1994 — half a century at the head of a Fox Valley manufacturer. Demand eventually outgrew the original plant and moved the company to the old All Steel facility near Highland and Cleveland in Aurora.
He never stopped being a salesman. He carried the product catalog long after he retired, and he thought selling was everyone's job — the president's most of all. His standing instruction was to under-promise and over-deliver.
People assume the sectors were picked from a labor-market report. They weren't. Advanced manufacturing, health sciences and the building trades are simply the three worlds John C. Dunham actually lived in — two through his company, one through his wife.
He ran manufacturing plants. This was the work itself — the floor he started on and the business he took national.
He used the trades constantly — electricians, pipefitters, HVAC, carpenters kept his plants running. He hired them, so he knew what they were worth.
His wife was a nurse. That's the whole reason healthcare sits alongside the other two — it came home with him every night.
John kept a list he called his rules to live by, and he used it on himself, his family, his employees and his friends. It is not a mission statement and it was never written for a website. It's a list of habits — which is exactly why it still works.
Show up. Do the hard part first. Don't dwell. — that's the whole job.
Read that list next to what JCD asks of the people it funds and there's no daylight between them. We don't ask for a grade point average or a test score. We ask you to show up, show up on time, show up prepared, and do the work of learning. Number three is the one we'd put on the wall: always do the worst job first.
In those three pillars. That's the mission.
Ask what most people get wrong about the trades and the answer isn't about wages or shortages. It's about a sentence people say out loud without ever hearing it.
Maybe it’s finally coming around.
That's the whole profile. Picture the student JCD most wants to reach and you get three qualities — none of them a number.
Nobody is going to stand behind you. You have to want it before we can help with it.
Shows up. Shows up on time. Shows up prepared. That's the bar every employer named.
An idea of what you want to do. Not certainty — an idea. That's more than a lot of eighteen-year-olds have, and more than most adults had at that age.
And if you don't have an idea yet? Then try something. We're unusually clear on this: starting a nursing program and discovering you hate it is not a failure, it's information. “That's fine. But at least you found out.” Go out to a welding program, decide it isn't for you — “there's nothing wrong with that. But at least you pursued it. Did something. And tried.”
You can't try a four-year degree. That's the point. The paths JCD funds are short enough and cheap enough that exploring one is a reasonable thing to do at eighteen — and checking one off your list is progress, not a wasted year.
Most scholarship applications gate on how well you tested. JCD doesn't. Every item below appears on peer applications in this region and appears nowhere on ours.
What we do ask for is one short answer, 300 words or less: what do you want to pursue? Not what you've overcome. Don't tell us about your history of being disadvantaged — just tell us what you want to do. First, because career aspiration is the thing that actually predicts whether this works. Second, because frankly it's none of our business.
Asked what success looks like in five years, the answer isn't a dollar figure or an application count. It's people.
On numbers, we'd rather be honest than impressive: there isn't one yet. Nobody knows whether a brand-new foundation draws fifty applications or five hundred. The first cycle sets the baseline; targets come after. [TK — Round 1 volume goals to be set after the Dec 2026–Feb 2027 window closes]
Three hundred words. That's the whole thing. No essay, no transcript minimum, no questions about your family.
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