Professor dr. Michael Biggins, recently appointed for a Honorary Consul of the Republic of Slovenia, has been working on students', researchers' and lecturers' exchanges between the University of Washington (WA) and Slovenia for a long time.

Now through March 31, 2018, every contribution to the Slovene Studies Endowment at the University of Washington (Seattle) will trigger a 1:1 matching contribution by a private donor, up to a maximum total amount of $100,000 – or, in other words, our donor will match up to $50,000 in new contributions from donors around the country and world with an additional $50,000 contribution of their own.

The expanded Slovene Studies Endowment at UW will support the annual exchange of outstanding faculty and PhD students between the UW and the University of Ljubljana, covers enrollment in summer intensive Slovene language courses by UW students, defrays the tuition costs of non-UW students from across the U.S. enrolling in UW courses in Slovene literature and culture via distance learning, and helps UW continue to develop the most extensive and up-to-date Slovene studies library collections in North America, which are available through interlibrary borrowing to any library user on this continent.

The UW Slovene Studies Endowment is a permanent fund, the interest of which (presently 4% annually) is used to support the UW-University of Ljubljana Scholars Exchange. In order to make the Scholars Exchange permanent and begin to support other Slovene Studies activities at UW, we must grow the Endowment from its current level of $140,000 to its near-term goal of $300,000. This matching donation opportunity will get us most of the way there.

Over the past twenty years the UW-Ljubljana Scholars Exchange has witnessed the participation of more than seventy outstanding professors and PhD students from the following fields: aeronautical engineering, art history, Asian studies, biology, choral music, classics (Latin, Greek, archaeology), computer science, economics, forestry, geography, landscape architecture, law, mathematics, medicine, physics, political science, Slavic languages, and sociology, among others.

We invite you to join us in taking advantage of this unique opportunity to anchor this important intiative among the permanent programs of one of America's leading universities, ensuring many more decades of collaborative work between UW and University of Ljubljana communities of experts in diverse fields.

For more information contact the UW coordinator for Slovene studies programs, Prof. Michael Biggins, at mbiggins@uw.edu, or make a direct and secure contribution to the Endowment on the Web at http://giving.uw.edu/Slovene.