Following a successful accounting career, COCPA Life Member Bert Bondi is helping students from Colorado and Wyoming earn their accounting degrees from his alma mater, the University of Notre Dame. 

Bondi, who grew up in Sheridan, Wyoming, earned his accounting degree from Notre Dame in 1967 and went on to spend the majority of his career in Colorado. Now retired from public accounting, he has served for more than a decade as a Notre Dame Entrepreneur in Residence, where he offers wisdom and guidance to aspiring young business owners.

Through his involvement with the entrepreneurial program he became familiar with the school’s financial aid mission – that no student should have to decline an offer to attend the university for financial reasons – and saw a way that he could help support that mission. 

Using funds from the sale of his firm in 2011, Bondi launched the Bondi Family Business Scholarship at Notre Dame. Since 2012, the fund has helped 36 students – all from Colorado or Wyoming – earn their accounting or marketing degrees.

“I certainly hadn’t been dreaming for decades of establishing a scholarship,” Bondi chuckles. But his ties to Notre Dame have remained strong through the years, and he saw the endowment, which has since grown to $1.8 million, as an opportunity to give back to a profession – and a school – that has brought so much to his own life. 

Check out the spring 2025 issue of NewsAccount to learn more about some of the “Bondi Scholars” who make up the future of the profession.

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