Shevchenko Foundation

About the business

The Shevchenko Foundation — its legal name is the Ukrainian Canadian Foundation of Taras Shevchenko — is a national charitable organization based in Winnipeg.

In its own words it is “entrusted to preserve, develop, and promote Ukrainian Canadian arts, heritage, community, and education”, and it works across the whole country. Its registered charitable number is 11927 3472 RR001.

It began with a monument. In 1959 the Ukrainian community in Canada set out to place a statue of Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet, on the grounds of the Manitoba Legislature, and raised $175,000 for it. On 9 July 1961 close to 25,000 Ukrainian Canadians came to Winnipeg to watch Prime Minister John Diefenbaker unveil it. The campaign finished with $30,000 left over, and that surplus became an endowment for Ukrainian culture in Canada. Parliament passed an Act to incorporate the Foundation, signed on 22 July 1963 by Governor General G. P. Vanier; the Ukrainian Canadian Congress named the first board and the Foundation was launched in 1964. Its first grant, that same year, was $400.

The model has not changed since. Gifts from donors are pooled and permanently invested, and the income they earn is what pays for grants, scholarships and community programs. The Foundation says it has reinvested more than $14 million into the Ukrainian community in Canada over its first sixty years, close to $1.4 million of it in 2025 alone.

Today it funds five streams of grants — arts, community development, education, heritage preservation and the Canadian WWI Internment Legacy — with application deadlines on 1 April and 1 October each year, and a separate round of scholarships, bursaries and awards open through July. Festivals sit inside the community development stream. It also runs its own programs: the KOBZAR Book Award, the REACH Mentorship/Residency for the Arts, the Emerging Writers Short Prose Competition, the annual Shevchenko commemorative bookmark, and the podcast Kultura Rising.

The Shevchenko Foundation is listed among the sponsors of UAFest 2026 in Carleton Place, Ontario, on 13 September 2026.