Community Campaign launched
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Here are only a fraction of the volunteers who showed up to be counted at the reception to launch this year’s internal community campaign.
Photo by kate hutchinson
Charity begins at home.
President Claude Lajeunesse was the first to say so at the Feb. 15 reception to launch this year’s internal Community Campaign.
It was the underlying message of everyone who addressed the 100 or so faculty and staff volunteers at the launch.
“Internal support sends a strong signal to the outside world,” said Kathy Assayag, Vice-President Advancement and Alumni Relations.
This year’s goal for the fundraising campaign is $150,000, up $10,000 from last year. Canvassers hope to bring faculty and staff participation up to 45 per cent. It was 38 per cent last year.
The theme of this year’s campaign is Everyone Counts. “Everyone is part of the equation,” Assayag said.
Accounting professor Michel Magnan and Irvin Dudeck, Director of Budgets, are the campaign co-chairs. “Counting is what we both do all day long.” Magnan said he agreed to co-chair the campaign “because students receive a big chunk of the money raised.”
Assayag said the priority of this year’s campaign is support for graduate students, and a case in point was Ezra Winton, a master’s student in Media Studies, who spoke at the launch.
Winton was a journeyman carpenter in Vancouver five years ago, when a back injury sidelined his career. His subsequent undergraduate degree put him into debt. “I was not going to do grad school unless I got funding,” he said.
Now he holds a Concordia fellowship and an Arts and Science Faculty Campaign for a New Millennium Student Contri-bution Scholarship. He has also earned a Nicolas-Diniacopoulos BBC Fellowship.
He created a weekly film series, Cinema Politica, that has been adopted by other schools. Maclean’s magazine wants to use it as one of the “best reasons to attend Concordia” in the student life section of the upcoming higher education issue.
Winton’s experience reinforced Provost Martin Singer’s message that Concordia depends on the people who make it work.
“We’re standing here on the 11th floor of a tower that some of us thought could never be built,” Singer said, looking around the EV building lounge where the launch was held. “Our dreams can become a reality.”
He said that as Concordia continues to expand, with over 43,500 students, “buildings are secondary to the people. This is exemplified by the efforts of fundraising volunteers who “use their personal time and personal energy.”