Spotlight Detail

UCI Giving Day, June 24, 2020

Save the date! UCI has rescheduled Giving Day for Wednesday, June 24. Let’s show the world that in times of great need, the UCI Armenian Studies community comes together and truly makes a difference. We hope you will join us on June 24 in supporting the UCI Armenian Language Fund. Your gift will support Armenian language instruction, which means preserving an endangered language, valuing cultural awareness, and ensuring students can meet the core requirements of the new minor in Armenian Studies.

UCI Giving Day is a one-day, online giving event where our whole UCI community comes together to support various causes across the university. This year, for the first time, we are having a Giving Day Campaign to raise funds for our UCI Armenian Language Fund. You may know that UNESCO listed Western Armenian as an endangered language. The language was nearly wiped out by the Armenian Genocide. At UCI, we’re committed to preserving the language that matters to so many of you and me by offering students courses in Western Armenian. These courses are crucial in contributing to the survival and flourishing of the Armenian language in the diaspora, as linguistic knowledge profoundly impacts cultural awareness and understanding.

Each year, to teach two levels of Western Armenian Language courses, we need funding of $60,000. For the next academic year, with the generous support from many of you who have joined us today, and others from our local Armenian community, we have already raised little over $40,000 so far. We are striving to close the gap and reach our goal of $60K by June 30th. No matter the size of your gift, your generosity and participation on Giving Day will have a meaningful impact on our students. It ensures that our students can meet the core requirements for the new minor in Armenian Studies by taking the language courses.

To encourage energetic participation from our community, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation has generously offered to match the first $6,000 raised toward the Armenian Language Instruction Fund on Giving Day. So each of your gifts will have double the impacts. We are deeply grateful to all of those who have already supported the language fund this year. If you haven’t yet, I ask you to join us on June 3rd and make a gift. You can also help us by sharing our campaign with your friends and family and on your social media to encourage more participation. It is the strength of our community that will help us continue our mission and reach our goals. Please mark your calendar for June 3rd and please visit UCI Armenian Studies Giving Day page here for more information.