This text is part of the special Philanthropy section
When you lead a fulfilling life and feel privileged, there may come a time when you want to give back. Many people then turn to their alma mater. But the UQAM Foundation can also count on donors who choose the university without having any direct link with it.
Anne and Gérard Bélanger started giving the UQAM Foundation $ 50,000 per year in 2015 to provide financial support bursaries to students in all faculties.
“The amount is reduced to $ 54,000 with inflation, so this year, we were able to give a scholarship of $ 13,500 to the doctorate, two scholarships of $ 6,750 to the masters and ten scholarships of $ 2,700 to the bachelor’s degree”, rejoices the one who has agreed to reveal his name as a donor to have the chance to meet the students he supports.
“I like when they talk to me about them in the ceremonies to thank donors,” he says.
If the stories of young people who need financial support to pursue their university studies so touch Gérard Bélanger, it is because he has already been in this situation. Although he comes from a “fairly poor family”, he is well aware that he was very lucky to be able to go to university.
“I did not understand at the time, but it was really because there was the school reform in the French-speaking sector in the early 1960s that I was able to take the classical course that had just started. be offered in the public network, he says. My family would not have had the means to send me to a private school to do so. “
He then attended Sainte-Marie College, which a few years later became one of the founding establishments of UQAM. Then he went on to study economics at the University of Western, Ontario. He had borrowed money to finance his first year of master’s degree, and then he managed to get a scholarship that funded the rest of his studies. Even before completing his doctoral thesis, he landed a job at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), where he fully realized.
“Education has changed my life and I hope to be able to improve things for certain French-speaking students who are in a situation similar to the one I was at their age”, adds the one who lived in Washington and who was lucky. to travel a lot during his career.
Anne and Gérard Bélanger decided in 2001 to make a testamentary donation to the UQAM Foundation in order to provide financial support bursaries. Then they realized when they came back to Canada that they were well enough financially to start giving during their lifetime.
Support excellence and field activities
While some support accessibility, others encourage excellence. This is what Robert Wares, a McGill University graduate geologist and co-founder of the Osisko mining company, which donated $ 1 million to the UQAM Foundation in 2019, chose this.
It thus enabled the creation of the Marie-Victorin Capitalized Fund to support and promote training in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. This fund offers merit scholarships of up to $ 5,000 to deserving students of the department, it supports the organization of field activities in Quebec, Canada and elsewhere in the world and allows the development of a teaching laboratory. of economic geology.
Better promote UQAM
Finding major donors with no direct link to UQAM is no small task. Sometimes it happens that an individual donation follows a corporate donation.
“We regularly meet with companies to raise funds and it happens that the donation relationship with an executive also develops in parallel,” notes Michelle Niceforo, Executive Director of the UQAM Foundation.
Large donors can also be directly approached to finance a project that sticks to their values. But one way or another, one thing remains. “The more UQAM shines for all its achievements and the more we put forward interesting and important projects, the more we will be able to find donors without direct ties to the university,” adds Michelle Niceforo.
UQAM has approximately 40,000 students per year and, since its creation in 1969, it has a total of over 280,000 graduates. UQAM’s School of Management Sciences (ESG) is the largest French-speaking management school in the world, with 15,000 students. UQAM also trains 30% of teachers in Quebec, including 70% of those in Montreal.