The Nancy Cavanaugh Scholarship

Nancy S. Cavanaugh was a tow head when she was a young child, and she loved to dress up, sing and otherwise entertain her parents.
“She was just a little spitfire,” says her mother, Ellen Dalton of Beverly Farms, a community just outside of Boston.

By high school, Cavanaugh—“Nan” to those who knew her well—was a scholar and an ambassador. She loved her friends and her dog Nebraska, and she had a compassionate conscience and the ability to reach out to others who were less fortunate. She was the kind of girl who befriended students who were sitting alone in the cafeteria, the kind of girl who knew how to bring people into the fold.
“That was who Nan was,” Dalton says.

This lovely woman with a gift for helping others could not connect to the help she needed for herself, though. She battled depression, anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder as a young adult, and in April 2012, one month before she would have received a master’s degree in social work from Westfield State University, Cavanaugh took her own life. She was 24.

To keep her memory alive and to benefit other students with a passion for giving of themselves, Dalton, her three surviving children and Cavanaugh’s father, Derek Cavanaugh of Boston, have established The Nancy S. Cavanaugh Scholarship Fund. “We wanted to make sure there was some legacy that she left,” Dalton said. “She would have been an incredible social worker. She was smart. She was in tune with people and their needs, and she really had a passion for working with people, especially kids. It just seemed like, if we could give somebody else a leg up, that that would be very fitting.”

“It’s about who Nan was,” she says. “She was somebody who could fill up a room. She had a huge voice, and she always spoke her mind and said her piece. “The bottom line is she really was a very caring and loving young woman,” Dalton added. “If you were Nan’s friend, you felt her presence. She would have made a difference in peoples’ lives as a social worker. She was stubborn and determined and would insist on making things happen.”