See correction appended below.
Auburn University is the home of ideas, interests and causes that range from saving wild tigers in India to a women’s air race for aviation students.
On Thursday, Feb. 21 Auburn will foster support for over 20 projects through Tiger Giving Day, its annual fundraising drive, which matches donors from around the world with causes near and dear to the Auburn Family.
Tiger Giving Day is a 24-hour drive that has many different causes from all across campus. Auburn garners support for everything from women’s 2,400-mile air race, which is the 43rd annual race in June, to the Tiger University Consortium’s efforts to save wild tigers, which is an inter-university collaboration with Clemson University, Louisiana State University and the University of Missouri. All of these universities are land-grant institutions with experience in conservation use this funding to support graduate student research to save wild tigers.
“Tiger Giving Day is the right time to raise awareness and support for the U.S. Tiger University Consortium, a multi-university effort to advance research and outreach to conserve tigers in the wild,” said Janaki Alavalapati, dean of the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences. “A century ago, there were more than 150,000 wild tigers roaming the planet. Now, only 3,800 tigers are left in the wild. Through Tiger Giving Day, the Auburn Family can pool its resources to help assure that this majestic symbol of our strength and unity, which inspires so many of our cherished traditions, will continue to live on in the wild.”
Tiger Giving Day will also benefit the Bee Lab’s bee-product facilities, which investigate ways to reverse the decline of the bee population and explores the effects of consumer’s demand for apian products.
“Our Tiger Giving Day project seeks to improve the Bee Lab’s bee product facilities, including equipment for honey extraction and pollen dehydration, so that students gain these valuable beekeeping experiences during their studies,” said Geoff Williams, assistant professor of entomology in Auburn’s College of Agriculture. “We provide training to students from Alabama in the hopes that some will take up the craft of beekeeping in the future.”
Although projects such as training equipment for Auburn’s Wheelchair Basketball team and solar-powered charging tables for the Student Center seem to have nothing in common, they are all tied together by the support that they receive from the Auburn Family on Tiger Giving Day.
TigerGiving.org will have information about all of its projects available on Feb. 21 with that real-time information about the support for each project to encourage donors and show the impact of their donations using the official hashtag, #TigerGivingDay. From its inception in 2015, Tiger Giving Day has directed support from over 5,000 donors into almost 60 projects.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Tiger Giving Day is supporting 60 projects this year. That was an error. The fundraising program is supporting 20 projects this year, but it has supported nearly 60 projects since its inception in 2015. We apologize for the error.
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