Mission Statement

The Shevchenko Scientific Society of Canada is a Ukrainian Canadian organization with a focus on education and learning. It welcomes members of all backgrounds who value education. The Society undertakes activities which advance education in the field of Ukrainian and Ukrainian Canadian history, culture, and language through regular public lectures by scholars and other specialists. It stimulates scholarly activity by providing research grants and support for publications. The Society provides forums for researchers, scientists, and artists to share their ideas and findings by organizing conferences, symposia, seminars, and round table discussions open to the general public. In the field of Ukrainian culture and history, the activities of the Society assist in providing scholarly information and help to formulate and facilitate positions on relevant topics in the Canadian community at large. This has been particularly valuable in light of the fact that scholarship in both Soviet Ukraine and post-Soviet Ukraine has often overlooked and distorted documented facts relating to Ukrainian history, culture and identity.
The Shevchenko Scientific Society has its intellectual and scholarly origins in the Shevchenko Society established in 1873 in Lviv, Western Ukraine, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Until its dissolution by the Soviet regime in 1939, it served as a pre-eminent Ukrainian scholarly entity. After World War II the Society was re-established in Europe and in 1949 in Canada where some of its original members settled. Its headquarters are in Toronto with branches in Edmonton, Ottawa, and Montreal. Currently its members reside from Halifax to Victoria.
The Society co-operates with other Shevchenko Scientific Societies in Australia, Slovakia, the United States of America, and Western Europe (headquartered in Sarcelles, France) and since 1989 with the renewed Lviv-based Shevchenko Scientific Society in Ukraine.