Invest in ESF with a year-end gift!

Dear Friend of ESF,

This year, the Foundation has had one of its best years ever. In our continued efforts to support Esperanto and to lay the groundwork for the teaching and learning of Esperanto, we have enjoyed a whole series of new successes. We have also won new friends in the scholarly community by our interest in looking at language problems across the world in new and imaginative ways.

We are blessed with a strong and dedicated board and with effective administrators and volunteers. And we work closely with organizations across the world – from the Universal Esperanto Association to the Washington-based Center for Applied Linguistics, and from national Esperanto associations to leading universities in many parts of the globe.

You will find below a brief description of some of the work that we are doing, and will continue to do with your help. Please read it over and decide for yourself. We are proud of what we have achieved and we hope that you will share that pride too.

We thank all our donors, and we invite you to join our many friends and colleagues in making a generous year-end gift to support our work. Together we can make significant progress – not in competition with others in the field but in a spirit of partnership. ESF helps good initiatives succeed: an investment in ESF is an investment in a peaceful future for the planet.

So won’t you join us?  We look forward to having you as a long-term partner in our work.

Humphrey Tonkin, Board Chair, ESF
Charles O. Mays, Executive Director
Yevgeniya Amis, Director of Development

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Why support ESF? Because we look after your money and spend it wisely. Because we search out worthwhile and promising projects and provide them with funding.

Web-based learning?  We launched and supported the first Esperanto course specifically designed for web-based learning: lernu.net has already reached almost one third of a million learners, is available in approx. 20 languages, and has recently undergone a complete redesign. Thousands of people in the US and Canada have earned or are learning Esperanto through Lernu.net.

Resources for teachers?  Far and away the most user-friendly and comprehensive web resource for teachers of Esperanto is edukado.net, which puts teachers and learners in touch with one another, offers a comprehensive range of resources for teachers, and serves as a clearinghouse for new ideas in Esperanto education. Most active teachers of Esperanto in North America are users of edukado.net.

Funds for research and publishing?  The success of Esperanto depends to a significant degree on its reputation as a serious subject of study by specialists in linguistics and cultural studies. And scholars who are already Esperanto speakers and want to do serious study need a place to turn. ESF offers a range of resources, including tekstaro.com, a corpus of written Esperanto based on over 100 book-length volumes fully digitized. ESF has underwritten publications and distribution of works in Esperanto ranging from Melnikov’s Gvidlibro tra Esperantio, a compilation of terms and ideas unique to the world of Esperanto, to Minnaja and Silfer’s History of Esperanto literature, and beyond.

Recent projects? ESF presides over a whole stable of researchers in and on Esperanto. In 2017, ESF funding supported an ethnographic study of the World Esperanto Congress in Seoul, underwrote a seminar on language planning at the University of Costa Rica in July under the leadership of Esperanto speakers, and provided scholarships for the certificate program in interlinguistics and Esperanto at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland, this September. Students attended the Poznan program from as far away as China, Korea, Brazil – and the USA.

North American funding?  Perhaps the best known of ESF’s programs is NASK, the North American Summer Courses, based in Raleigh, North Carolina, and offering a short intensive program for those wishing to improve and perfect their Esperanto. Some fifty people attended this summer, many of them on scholarships funded through ESF.

Who else is doing what we’re doing?  There’s actually no organization like ESF anywhere else in the world. In 2018 ESF will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary as by far the largest independent funder of Esperanto teaching and research on a worldwide scale.

How have we got here? By conserving our resources and investing them wisely, and by funding promising and carefully chosen projects. It’s a winning combination of dependability and imagination. By supporting ESF you are supporting the future of Esperanto and the future of informed international understanding.

Yes! I want to support the Esperantic Studies Foundation in the year ahead by making a year-end gift now!

$1000 (Patron Level)

$500 (Gold Level)

$250 (Silver Level)

$100 (Bronze Level)

Other Amount

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