Promised A $14,000 Scholarship By A Government-sponsored Competition That Was Suspended And Hasn’t Paid Or Responded To Me

I won a $14,000 college scholarship at a competition I did last year, when I was in high school. The promise of the award was very well documented (paperwork, emails, media coverage, website, social media posts, etc.), as was the fact that I specifically won one of the awards. This competition was funded by a government department and ran by an association of teachers, although it functioned like its own organization. This year, the competition was suspended, the website was taken down, and all that was said is to email a specific government email for any questions (although this email address has not responded to any of my messages).

The problem is that the payment was supposed to be disbursed in small chunks each semester, and I have not received any payments or information since the suspension. I don’t know if the money was preallocated or not, but regardless there seems to be no staff present to send the money. I am considering whether I can somehow sue for this money, but there are some things I’m confused about.

First, who would I be able to sue if the specific competition is gone? Could I sue the government department that suspended it without a plan for giving promised payments? Second, is there a way I could obtain enough legal help to pull off a lawsuit without spending most of the $14,000 on it? While this is a lot of money for me as a college student, I understand it is relatively small, and am struggling to find the other competition winners that I could potentially join up with to sue for a larger sum (the total amount of money all past winners lost is probably around $200,000 but I don’t think I could contact most of them successfully).

Location: I went to high school in New York State and won the competition at that time, but the competition is a national organization. That particular year it was physically held in Virginia, and I currently go to college in Georgia, but I don’t think any of these locations will have much impact. I am intentionally not naming the competition or government department to conform to this subreddit’s guidelines, but if a moderator feels it appropriate I would share the large government department’s name.