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How Community Support Makes Paris Possible
On Thursday, November 19, after a year of changes and challenges, the AUP community came together to set the record for the most donors supporting the University in a single day.
The AUP alumni community is as passionate and cause-driven as our staff, faculty and student body. Throughout 2020, alumni provided unprecedented support during a difficult period for AUP, through online guest lectures, student mentorship programs and much-needed financial contributions – not least on the University’s first-ever Giving Day. This one-day campaign aimed to set a record for the most charitable gifts received by AUP in a single day. Thanks to the 188 donors who raised over €95,000 between them, that record has been firmly broken.
The Giving Day campaign called on community members to help #MakeParisPossible in a year of uncertainty and instability in higher education. “Having participated in the Giving Tuesday movement for the past two years, we decided to launch AUP’s own Giving Day on November 19,” explains Mary McLean Evans, AUP’s Vice President for Presidential Initiatives. “The response was extraordinary, with parents, trustees and even faculty and staff coming together to support the AUP community.”
Contributors were able to allocate their donations across three broad categories: supporting students, including via AUP’s new Black Alumni at AUP scholarship; campus development, specifically via funding next spring’s construction work on The Monttessuy Center for the Arts; or la vie quotidienne, an unrestricted giving initiative aimed at ensuring the health and well-being of our students, staff and faculty. Unrestricted donations enabled the University to pivot quickly to temporary remote learning protocols in response to government confinement measures in both March and November of this year.
- Marissa Rico ’21
Throughout Giving Day, several members of AUP’s Leadership Team and Board of Trustees challenged the AUP community to match donations, galvanizing alumni support by pledging to top up individual gifts. “In this extraordinary year, when so many of our students are studying in confinement and remotely from around the world, it is more important than ever to support our community,” comments AUP President Celeste M. Schenck, whose own €4,000 donation added €100 to 40 community gifts. Every donation, whether large or small, helped make Paris possible for our global explorers, shoring up the University’s finances at a turbulent time and having an immediate impact on students, staff and faculty in confinement across Paris.
AUP is a nonprofit organization, and its budget cannot be met by tuition alone. So much of the global liberal arts education that AUP offers is made possible by the generosity of parents, alumni and friends of the University. “We are especially grateful for financial support this Giving Day to make Paris possible not just this year, but for the foreseeable future,” says Schenck. “Your support of the AUP community is deeply appreciated every single day by the students, faculty and staff who benefit from your generosity.”
