Smith’s wife and daughters are the drivers behind the CHET scholarship fund
A scholarship fund for college-bound students has been established through CancerCare of Connecticut in the memory of the late Chet Arthur Smith, a Westport business executive who was imbued with a passion for learning.
The fund provides financial assistance for college and university students from Connecticut who have lost a parent or a sibling to cancer.
Smith was a vice president at Goldman Sachs in New York and Chicago and a cofounder and managing director of Soleil Securities, a Wall Street research institution. He was 41 and a nonsmoker when he died in 2006 of lung cancer.
The scholarships are known by the acronym CHET which stands for We Care, We Help and We Excel Together.
They were initiated by Smith’s wife and their two daughters, 10, and 7, starting with a wine tasting last year that raised $50,000, much of the startup money contributed by Chet’s Smith’s business colleagues and friends. The daughters alone sold $1,000 worth of raffle tickets.
Additional information about the scholarships is available by calling Lisa Cannella, regional director of CancerCare of Connecticut, at (203) 663-2191 or via e-mail at lcannella@cancercare.org
