Smart Swaps

Big, bearded V.R. ("Swede") Roskam was even more ebullient than usual. "Everybody wins!" he boomed two weeks ago, as he was announcing next year's recipients of some 50 college scholarships from his own imaginative, nonprofit enterprise. The organization, which he set up two years ago in Glen Ellyn, Ill., is called Assistance Ltd. Roskam, an industrial sales executive with a soft spot for small private colleges and young scholars looking for help, finds a school that needs equipment. Then he talks corporations into donating excess equipment as tax-deductible gifts. The colleges in turn arrange for scholarships equaling the value of the gifts to high school graduates from lowincome families.

The Monsanto Co. of St. Louis, for example, has come up with more than $143,000 in office equipment, laboratory gear and other products. Allied Van Lines has donated haulage of 40 shipments of materials from Monsanto and other companies to schools like John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Ark. So far Roskam has wheeled and dealed in 21 states to produce 200 scholarships. One recipient is

Derrick Towns, 19, a freshman at Chicago's North Park College. Could Towns have made it to school without Assistance Ltd.? "I'd be working at a Burger King, maybe, or anything I could get," he replies. Another big winner: Roskam, who just learned that Assistance Ltd. this month will receive a special citation from President Reagan's program for private sector initiatives.