Built by someone who started building early.

The story

In 1987, in El Segundo, California, a Boy Scout troop and a Girl Scout troop founded what became known as the world's first nonprofit organization run entirely by kids: Tree Musketeers. Its president, from 1987 to 1994, was a kid named Brook Church-Koegel.

That early lesson — that young people can build real institutions when someone backs them — never left him. Brook went on to a career across management consulting for hedge funds and private equity firms, operating leadership, and private equity in insurance and real estate. In 2018 he founded Alpha Capital Management, an asset management firm that invests as a co-GP alongside institutional investors, and built two education platforms — the Insurance Education Institute and Advisors Edge — teaching financial professionals the quantitative methods behind their work.

Markets rise and fall. What you truly learn, you keep. An education is the one asset no market can take back.

The Brook Church-Koegel Scholarship is the same conviction, pointed at students: a $1,000 award, paid to the recipient's college or university and applied 100% to tuition, funded personally by Brook, for a student at an accredited U.S. college or university who is building something — a skill, a project, an organization, a future.

Brook Church-Koegel

Scholarship Founder · Founder & CEO, Alpha Capital Management

Investor, educator, and builder of things that last — from the world's first kid-run nonprofit to a co-GP asset management firm in El Segundo, California.

Read his full story ↗

Find Brook’s own accounts in his official profile directory.

What "deserving" means here

There is no GPA cutoff and no preferred major. The selection looks for evidence of building:

• Initiative — something you started: a project, a business, a club, a body of work, a habit that changed your trajectory.
• Persistence — proof you kept going when it stopped being fun.
• Clarity of purpose — a believable connection between your education and what you intend to build next.
• Character — the essay reads like a person, not an application.