AEF CAMPAIGN CONNECTION
Investing in a Vision The APEGA Education Foundation has begun the New Year with a renewed focus on underrepresented groups and students in financial need. Not to mention some ambitious fundraising goals
BY CORINNE LUTTER Member & Internal Communications Coordinator
With its 20-year anniversary just around the corner, the APEGA Education Foundation (AEF) has unveiled new mission and vision statements to guide the organization into its next 20 years. The mission statement defines the foundation’s overall purpose: We strengthen the Engineering and Geoscience Professions in Alberta by funding STEM outreach, providing financial assistance to students and encouraging more post-secondary capacity. (STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics.) The vision statement reflects the foundation’s aspirations for the future: Albertans are excited about careers in engineering and geoscience and have ready access to them. The foundation has never had a vision statement, and its mission statement needed updating to more clearly describe its work. “The new mission and vision statements reflect our core values and will help guide the board’s strategic decision making as we begin rolling out our new business plan, which sets several ambitious goals for the next five years,” says AEF President Dan Motyka, P.Eng., FEC, FGC (Hon.), a past president of APEGA. “They also give our donors — who are mostly APEGA Members — a better understanding of what the foundation does to help attract young people into the professions.” AEF’s mission statement was approved in December. It sets a new direction and focus for the foundation, which was founded in 1996 and since then has disbursed about $2 million in scholarships, bursaries and outreach funding in Alberta.
$5,000 each. Currently, they range in value from $1,000 to $5,000. To meet this target, the foundation needs to raise $72,000 more each year than it does now. The foundation also wants to provide more financial support to groups that are underrepresented in the professions, including women and Aboriginals, by increasing the number of bursaries available to them. Right now, the foundation awards $55,000 in these bursaries each year, which it hopes to double to $110,000. This ties closely to the foundation’s other primary goal in its business plan: to increase outreach funding to attract more Alberta youth — girls and Aboriginals in particular — into Professional Engineering and Geoscience careers. “Students want to make a difference in society, yet many don’t know how engineering and geoscience could help them meet that goal,” says Mr. Motyka. “We have an opportunity to give them that exposure by funding organizations that open kids’ minds to the exciting opportunities in the STEM fields.” Over the next five years, the foundation wants to increase outreach funding from $95,000 to $145,000 annually. It already provides outreach funding to the universities of Alberta, Calgary and Lethbridge, Red Deer College and organizations like Cybermentor and the Alberta Women’s Science Network. APEGA and AEF are also working on an agreement which would see the foundation take over APEGA’s current outreach funding to outside organizations, valued at about $400,000 annually. Says Mr. Motyka: “The foundation supports outreach programs to engage young people and encourage them to enter the fields of engineering or geoscience. Outreach is critical to maintaining a diverse membership and to ensuring there are enough professionals to meet market demand.” Reaching out to more young women and Aboriginals is an important step in growing the diversity of the professions, he adds. Currently, 20 to 25 per cent of undergraduate engineering students at the University of Alberta and University of Calgary are women. In geosciences, up to half of undergraduate students are women. But at the professional level, the proportion of women drops by about 50 per cent. Only about 11 per cent of APEGA’s membership is female. APEGA and AEF, along with a number of other organizations, are working to increase the number of women in the Engineering and Geoscience Professions to 30 per cent by 2030.
BIG PLANS
One of the primary goals of the new business plan is to increase the number and value of the scholarships and bursaries awarded to post-secondary engineering and geoscience students, with a focus on those in financial need. Currently, the foundation awards about 50 scholarships and bursaries each year, valued at about $195,000. “What drives many of our donors to give is being able to help students who can’t go to university because of the cost. Currently, engineering tuition at Alberta universities exceeds $6,000 annually and it continues to rise,” says Mr. Motyka. “So we’re going to focus on kids who have financial need to help eliminate that barrier and ensure that education remains accessible to everyone.” To do this, one of the objectives in the new business plan is to increase the value of all scholarships and bursaries to at least
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