Site Vision
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The Canada-Hungary Educational Foundation / Fondation éducative Canada-Hongrie (CHEF), a registered educational charity, was set up in December 2005 to create awareness for Canada’s role in accepting close to 40,000 Hungarian refugees in 1956-57 and highlighting the contributions those refugees eventually made to Canadian life.
The short-term focus of the Foundation is on the 50th anniversary of this refugee movement, and the story of their integration – and that of the wider Hungarian Canadian community – into Canadian society. In the longer term, the Foundation will explore the centrality of the refugee experience to Canadian society and identity through educational projects. This website is such a project.
The Foundation’s objective in developing this site is to foster an appreciation among Canadians of the important role which Canada has played in accepting refugees. It strives to educate Canadians, and indeed people around the world – for websites have no borders – about the positive aspects of the refugee experience and the inestimable value of the contribution of refugees and their descendants to Canadian society. The anniversary year 2006-7 provided a good opportunity for CHEF to draw attention to this by undertaking a number of activities, often in partnership with others. Some of these activities are described on this new website.
To read about the aims of the website, please see the Site Vision page.
You can read about the goals and objectives of CHEF on the original website of the Canada Hungary Educational Foundation set up in 2006. That website was started in order to share information about events across Canada during 2006-7 to mark the 50th anniversary of the arrival of some 38,000 Hungarian refugees to Canada.
In 2007-8 when the Foundation set up its new multi-media website www.hungarianpresence.ca, we stopped regularly updating the original site but those interested in it can still access it from this page as well as by simply clicking on here.