The Walter M. Cunningham Education Foundation, a sister organization of the UCLS, is a nonprofit corporation that provides funding and grants to low-income students and provides academic opportunities and educational experiences to Surveying, Mapping and Geomatics students.
Walter Cunningham was a beloved land surveyor who unfortunately passed away in January 2023. The foundation continues to carry on his legacy of educating and supporting students with academic opportunities and educational experiences.
Walter’s surveying career started in 1966 while helping a local land surveyor find property-corner monuments for a construction project on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. From then, he performed private- and public-sector work on a wide variety of construction, boundary, public lands, mapping and oil-field projects. Walter earned a Bachelor of Science in Mapping from Brigham Young University in 1988, followed by a Utah Professional Land Surveyor’s (PLS) license in 1991.
While operating his full-time surveying business, he was hired by Salt Lake Community College (SLCC) in 1994 as an Adjunct surveying faculty member. In 2004, he accepted a full-time position at SLCC, where he coordinated the Surveying & Geomatics Program and taught in it as an Associate Professor. He was a member of the Advisory Board for Utah Valley University’s (UVU) four-year Geomatics degree program and served two years on the National Society of Professional Surveyors (NSPS) Certified Surveying Technician (CST) Board. He similarly served three years on the SLCC Faculty Senate. He was an avid supporter of the UCLS, serving at the Chapter and State levels in various positions and assignments, including Chair of the Education Committee. Walter was honored by the UCLS as the 2006 Utah Surveyor of the Year and by the Utah Engineers Council as a 2013 Engineering Educator of the Year. He was also a recipient of the 2015 SLCC Foundation’s Teaching Excellence Award. He retired from SLCC in 2017.
Since its inception in 2018, the foundation has continuously participated in UCLS fundraisers and events to not only raise money for the scholarships but also to promote land surveying as a career to the next generation.
