Roman Yereniuk, Moderator
St. Andrew’s College, University of Manitoba
ROMAN YERENIUK is an associate professor of church history at St. Andrew’s College in Winnipeg and a sessional instructor in Eastern Christianity at the Centre for Ukrainian Canadian Studies and Dept. of Religion, University of Manitoba. He has also been a long-time administrator with both units of the university. Roman has written two volumes, published some 50 studies/articles, and has organized and participated in numerous conferences/symposia in Ukraine and Canada on the theme of the Ukrainian-Canadian diaspora. In addition, he has done extensive research and publishing on Ukrainian Orthodoxy, including the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Canada, and is the editor of the journal Faith and Culture at St. Andrew’s College.
I think it is very apropos that we left this session to the very end. At the same time, I want to tell you how proud I am: we have a very rich session with four of the finest people CIUS could have found, plus a commentator who is coming from the national convention of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress. Ladies and gentlemen, let us begin with a couple of general remarks. First of all, I want to say that I was told by the organizers of this auspicious event that community outreach can be defined very broadly, but we can also make it as narrow as we wish, and it will be up to each of our speakers on the panel to do this. We want to work with community institutions to advance higher education, to find agencies, endowments, and others that could continue the great work of CIUS to support Ukrainian studies through some of our smaller community grants and scholarships and library funds. All of this will be part and parcel of this panel on community outreach.
Everybody on this panel has received two questions: (1) How can we improve community outreach and provide new incentives for our academic life across Canada? (2) How do we provide further and new co-operation with the Ukrainian community and the community at large? We are going to give our presenters fifteen minutes each, and our discussant will also have fifteen minutes. At the end we are going to open it up to the community at large, beginning with some responses from graduate students. We have to end this session by a quarter after five to allow for the final conference conclusions and statement. I remind you that the biographies of all the presenters are at the back of our program. First of all, Andrew Hladyshevsky, an Edmonton lawyer, is going to speak to us on behalf of the Ukrainian Canadian Foundation of Taras Shevchenko. This is the paramount foundation of the Ukrainian community in Canada.