Look what Amish Women Can Do!

Today I would like to honor the founders of the Amish Descendant Scholarship Fund, Emma Miller and Naomi Kramer Yoder.

With only the eighth-grade education of her Amish childhood, Emma had earned her GED, then began taking college courses at a community college before enrolling at San Diego State University. She writes: “The idea for ADSF came to me quite often because I searched for Amish Scholarship Funds repeatedly during my university years. It was hard to imagine there was none, since there’s a scholarship for everything. I realized the only reason there wasn’t one was because no one had created it yet and I asked myself ‘If not me, then who?'”

Emma graduated from San Diego State University in the year 2010. She describes that experience this way, “On my graduation day, I experienced the most bittersweet moment of my life. I was so proud and so happy, but I saw all the families together and mine wasn’t there. When they asked us to stand up and give a special thank you to our families who had supported us along the way, I started sobbing. I looked up in the audience and saw that some of my friends were crying with me. My parents didn’t even know I was graduating.”

That day Emma vowed to herself that she was going to do everything she could to make it easier for others with an Amish background to go to college or university.

Enter Emma’s cousin, Naomi Kramer Yoder, who helped plan and establish the founding of ADSF, and who was a student at Goshen College, struggling to make ends meet, yet committed to her studies to become a nurse. To learn more about her story, you can follow this link. 

Both Emma and Naomi have gone on to accomplish much in their young lives.

Emma has earned a Masters degree in Economics and Finance from London Metropolitan University and she now works for the Shell Foundation in London, England, working with entrepreneurs who bring access to clean energy in low-income areas in Africa and India.

Naomi earned her nursing degree from Goshen College, which included a semester abroad in Peru, where she studied Peruvian culture and learned to speak Spanish. She started her nursing career as a med-surg nurse, but has since developed a passion for labor and delivery. She helped open a birth center in Nappanee, Indiana in 2016 and was one of the first nurses hired there. She attended the very first birth at that birth center and has attended hundreds of births since. She works largely with the Plain communities (Amish and Mennonites) and speaks to the mothers in their own language. Noami has become both accepted and loved as a birth worker in the community. She is working on her Masters degree to become a Certified Nurse Midwife.

In 2025, Emma stepped aside from being an administrator at ADSF because of other life demands. Naomi is a current board member and has helped steer the organization into what it is today. ADSF now has non-profit status, allowing for acceptance of online donations. The new website and blog has increased development and outreach. In 2025, ADSF had more applicants and awarded more scholarships than any other year previously. This year we opened our application period on April 1, and we already have 13 applications, and we have ten more weeks to go until we close the application period for this year.

Since it was founded, ADSF has awarded 138 scholarships for a total of $291,300 in funds. Former recipients hold successful careers in the medical field, academics, teaching, business, computer science, criminal justice, and finance. One person is now a physicist and another an airline pilot.

It is an honor to help advance ADSF’s mission to build a supportive community that helps students navigate the challenges of college after an early education limited to the eighth grade. I am grateful to work in partnership with the current ADSF team, which includes Naomi, and two former ADSF scholarship recipients, Eythana Miller and Sharon Beachy. For a biography of all the members of the ADSF team, you can visit the the About Us page. And it all started with two gifted young women who brought their vision to fruition to give formerly Amish students the helping hand they wished they would have had when they were going to college.

The challenge for the current team is to raise enough funds to meet the need of our growing number of scholarship applicants. If you feel inspired by Naomi’s and Emma’s generosity of spirit in founding ADSF, and our current team’s goal of lending a helping hand to our worthy student applicants, will you consider clicking over to the ADSF Donate page and leaving a gift?

Thank you for reading, and thank you for your generosity.