2020 GLOBAL GIVING CAMPAIGN RAISES US $0.5 MILLION
August 1 is celebrated in many Caribbean territories as Emancipation Day, marking the freedom of enslaved Africans who were victims of the transatlantic slave trade. While we honour and pay tribute to that past, the regional University recognises that education is one of the most critical means to freedom, particularly for the current generation of youth. UWI Global Giving is a vital way that every member of the UWI community can make an impact on the University and contribute to Caribbean development by ensuring the future of the region’s human resource capacity. Unusual times call for unusual measures. For this reason, in 2020, the University extended its annual Global Giving campaign tradition from one week to one month for the first time. The response was overwhelming as myriad gifts and forms of support poured in from across the region and the globe to assist our students whose finances, and those of their parents, have been negatively affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
With the focus primarily on encouraging individuals to give— as little or as much as they could afford—personal responses were the highest ever in the campaign’s history. In addition to the online donations, scholarships and endowments from alumni and friends, this helped to achieve the ambitious 2020 campaign target of US$500,000. These combined efforts amounted to a big impact for many deserving students. For the current generation of students, the global impact of COVID-19 will be a defining part of their experience. Yet, this generation will also be called upon to navigate through to the other side of the pandemic. They will be a generation that the region will need more than ever. Confronted with the reality that at least 10,000 of our current population of 50,000 students were functioning in difficult social circumstances because of the COVID-19 pandemic and contemplating “sitting out the academic year”, the University was resolute that this was not a time for our students to retreat from the university experience. The Global Giving campaign demonstrated our commitment to creating access to education, and to ensuring that no student is left behind at a time when education matters.
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