AUBG Alumni Pledge Exceeds $300,000 Goal for Year One

Less than a year after its launch, the ambitious initiative, led by the AUBG Alumni Association, has been more than successful. Thanks to over 150 alumni and several particularly generous donations, the goal of $300,000 for Year One of the Pledge has been surpassed.

“I feel so grateful and humbled by how many alumni are taking it as an honor and as an obligation to go out, call fellow graduates and ask them to contribute,” said initiator of the pledge Deyan Vassilev (‘95). “The pledge helps the community and the community helps the pledge.”

And while the pledge has reached its nominal goal, AUBG alumni are still more than welcome to contribute, Vassilev said, explaining that they can join Year One of the Pledge by the end of AUBG’s fiscal year in June 2020. “Let’s keep the energy high and try to get to 200-300 alumni donations,” Vassilev said. Every donation, regardless of its size, can make a difference and is proof of how united the AUBG community is, he said. The ten-year goal of the pledge is to reach 25% alumni participation.

Svetozar Georgiev (‘00), co-founder of Telerik, Telerik Academy and Campus X, pledged to donate $50,000 to AUBG over five years. “For me personally, the biggest reward in life is to help others succeed,” he said. “We are lots of people, and our collective capabilities are substantial. So, we just need to keep catalyzing this collective energy because every community needs to be managed and maintained, or it might linger and lose momentum.”

Two $100,000 donations come from Krassen Draganov (‘96) and Dilian Pavlov (‘95), who are co-founders of Dynamo Software, a leading investment management software provider with 220 employees on four continents. “AUBG was a trampoline for us and it helped us when we needed help,” Draganov said in an interview at the AUBG alumni gathering in Boston earlier this year. “Now, it is time for us to help and support the university that has done so many things for us. Everybody can support the university within their means, but it would be great if more people remember, connect and help the university with whatever they can.”

Pavlov’s donation will go towards AUBG scholarship support for the winners of the AUBG MultiTalent Quest, an international two-round competition for high school juniors that tests their knowledge and talents in a variety of academic skills and extracurricular interests. “The winners of the Quest are top-notch potential AUBG students because AUBG is itself a place where you can have many interests and talents,” Vassilev, who is also a driving force behind the MultiTalent Quest, said.

A graduate of the first class, Vassilev has played an instrumental role in supporting the university in various capacities. “It will not be an overstatement to say that AUBG has shaped and continues to shape my life in many ways,” he said. “We were the founding class of the university and we helped create it from scratch. In 1991, there was a building, a dozen professors, a hundred students and 30 books in the library. It was make-believe: let’s make a university, let’s create a student government, let’s create a radio station, let’s create a choir, let’s create sports clubs.”

Twenty-eight years later, AUBG has about 1000 current students, over 30 student clubs, one of the largest English-language libraries in Eastern Europe, professors coming from the best schools on five continents and over 4,000 alumni from more than 80 countries. Those alumni now hold leading positions in international companies, have launched their own successful businesses, or change the world through their work in government, education, or the NGO sector. They stay connected to AUBG and feel the urge to give back to the university that shaped them both personally and professionally.

Vassilev, who is the founder and CEO of Bulgaria’s first mortgage brokerage and credit consulting company in Bulgaria Creditland.bg and of the leading financial comparison portal in the country Moitepari.bg, is one good example of the AUBG values. “I have continued to be entrepreneurial in my business life and have learned this proactive attitude at AUBG,” he said. “I like to refer to the ‘Spirit of AUBG’ that we created as a founding class and that continues to live on. The goal is to find new carriers of this spirit, of this community life. I think that AUBG’s future really depends on us as alumni and if we all believe AUBG was and still is so unique and important for the region and our lives, then we have to do enough to support it.”

We reached out to some of the other graduates that played an essential role in setting up and advancing the Alumni Pledge and asked them about their reasons to join it.