UCLA Armenian Student Association Donates Proceeds of “Coachellian” Fundraiser to USC Shoah Foundation

USC and UCLA may be rivals on the football field, but they came together for a very important cause last week.

Members of the UCLA Armenian Student Association visited the USC Shoah Foundation office to present the proceeds of their annual fundraiser “Coachellian” to Sylvia Moskovitz, director of development, and Carla Garapedian of the Armenian Film Foundation. The students want the money to go toward USC Shoah Foundation’s Armenian Genocide collection.

Coachellian (an Armenian play on the Coachella music festival), was held May 14 at the UCLA Fowler Amphitheatre. The evening featured musical performances by Satellite City, Manda Paul, Tahkt Dirty featuring an Armenian dance group, Ooshatsank and R-Mean, guest speakers including Garapedian, and free food provided by local restaurants as well as a raffle.

While Coachellian had free admission, UCLA ASA encouraged all attendees to leave donations for USC Shoah Foundation’s Armenian Genocide collection. They raised $300.

Filmmaker and historian J. Michael Hagopian partnered with the USC Shoah Foundation in 2010 to preserve and integrate his collection of 400 Armenian Genocide survivor testimonies, recorded from 1972-2005, into the Visual History Archive.

The entire collection, converted from the original 16mm film to digital Motion JPEG 2000 files, was officially handed off from the Armenian Film Foundation (AFF) to the USC Shoah Foundation in April 2014, so that the work of indexing and integrating the testimonies into the Visual History Archive can begin. The goal is to begin making the testimonies available to watch and search in the VHA in 2015, the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.