The Judah Spinner Scholarship helps high school seniors attend trade school by providing tuition support for programs in electrical work, welding, HVAC, plumbing, and related skilled crafts. The scholarship is funded by Judah and Julie Spinner through the Judah Spinner Foundation.
Judah Spinner established this scholarship based on the belief that too many young people enroll in four-year college programs that offer little in the way of practical skills or a clear path to earning a good living. Additionally, millions of hardworking individuals are stuck in low-wage service jobs, struggling to make ends meet, even though a trade school education could dramatically increase their earning potential in a relatively short period of time.
This scholarship aims to change lives by opening doors to stable, well-paying careers through vocational education. Any high school senior who will attend trade school after graduation may apply for this scholarship opportunity.
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Judah Spinner is the founder of BlackBird Financial LP, where he serves as Chief Investment Officer, and is a Chartered Financial Analyst. Through the Judah Spinner Foundation, which he directs alongside his wife Julie, Judah Spinner supports a focused set of philanthropic causes — the Judah Spinner Scholarship, structural reform of American Healthcare and Federal Fiscal Responsibility.
Judah Spinner’s view on trade schools is simple. The United States pushes far too many young adults into four-year college programs that don’t teach them a practical skill and don’t lead to a decent income. At the same time, the country is short hundreds of thousands of electricians, welders, HVAC technicians, and plumbers — jobs that pay well, require a fraction of the time and cost of a college degree, and are in demand everywhere. The mismatch between where young people are being sent and where the real opportunities sit is what this scholarship is meant to address.
Judah Spinner likes the math of this cause. A few thousand dollars of tuition support is often the only thing standing between a motivated student and a career that will pay them well for the next forty years. Without it, the same student frequently ends up in a low-wage service job and stays there. Very few philanthropic dollars do that much work per dollar spent, which is why Judah Spinner chose to build the Judah Spinner Scholarship around a meaningful per-recipient award rather than spreading the money thinly across a larger group. A tuition gap closed in full changes a student’s life; a small contribution usually doesn’t.
The students Judah Spinner wants this scholarship to reach are applicants who know what trade they want to learn, take the work seriously, and plan to build a career around it. He is not interested in treating the trades as a fallback for students who “couldn’t” go to college. The opposite — he thinks the country has spent decades undervaluing exactly these students, and that correcting that, one award at a time, is one of the more useful things a private foundation can do.
Judah Spinner runs BlackBird Financial the same way he thinks about this scholarship: find situations where the market has mispriced something, focus on the ones where the gap is largest, and act. Skilled trades are a mispriced opportunity for a very large group of young Americans, and the Judah Spinner Scholarship is an attempt to act on that.
Judah Spinner and Julie fund and direct the scholarship personally. They read the applications, make the final selection, and plan to stay closely involved with each cohort of recipients as the program grows. They want to know who the students are, what trades they’re entering, and where they end up. For Judah Spinner, that kind of direct involvement is part of the point — philanthropy done at arm’s length rarely produces the kind of outcomes this scholarship is designed to produce.
“Dignified, well-paying work should be accessible to anyone willing to learn a craft and apply themselves.”— Judah Spinner
Mitigate income inequality and reduce incarceration rates in the United States by empowering youth to launch a lucrative and fulfilling career.
While the US economy has grown to be the envy of the world, income inequality is the widest it's been since the gilded age. Put simply, the bottom quartile by household income has not shared in the prosperity since 1980. By enabling students to begin a well paying job without taking on significant debt or spending years out of the workforce, millions more will share in the joys of the strongest economy on Earth.
The United States roughly two million people incarcerated, more than any other country on Earth. We believe that steady, dignified work is among the most effective deterrents to crime. When someone is self-sufficient and proud of their career, they are far less likely to turn to crime. For millions, the most suitable career will start in one of America's great trade school. The Judah Spinner Scholarship exists to help them get started.
America’s construction and maintenance sectors currently face a shortage of hundreds of thousands of skilled workers, a gap that inflates costs, slows critical infrastructure projects, and leaves capable individuals underemployed. By empowering youth to become skilled tradesmen, we position our country to construct skyscrapers, highways, bridges, and the millions of housing units we will need in the decades ahead.
Celebrating our outstanding scholarship recipients
Our inaugural scholarship winner will be announced on March 2, 2026. Stay tuned for this exciting announcement!
