Nominations open for $1 million global humanitarian award

PanARMENIAN.Net - Nominations opened on Wednesday, June 1 for the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity, an annual international humanitarian award, the initiative said on its website.

The Aurora Prize seeks personal stories of individuals who have put themselves at personal risk for the sake of others.

Nominations are open to the public from now until September 9, 2016 at auroraprize.com.

Anyone can nominate a candidate they believe has overcome great personal challenges to make an exceptional impact on preserving human life and advancing humanitarian causes.

Every year, an Aurora Prize Laureate is honored with a $100,000 grant, as well as a $1,000,000 award to be donated to charitable organizations that inspired their work.

“Like the winner of the inaugural Aurora Prize, Marguerite Barankitse, I, too, have witnessed firsthand the terrible atrocities that humans are capable of inflicting upon one another,” said Elie Wiesel, Aurora Prize Co-Chair. “It has given me a profound appreciation for those individuals who put themselves at risk to help their fellow man. These are the very people we are honoring with the Aurora Prize.”

The first-ever Aurora Prize Laureate, Marguerite Barankitse of Maison Shalom, was honored in April for saving and caring for 30,000 children, orphans and refugees during Burundi’s civil war.

The Aurora Prize is the philanthropic vision of co-founders Vartan Gregorian, Noubar Afeyan and Ruben Vardanyan, who sought to express gratitude and memorialize those whose heroic actions saved lives during the Armenian Genocide more than one hundred years ago. Continuing the cycle of giving, the Aurora Prize carries forward that legacy of gratitude.

The second annual Aurora Prize will be presented on April 24, 2017, in Yerevan, Armenia.