Professor Gérard Gardner, Ph.D.
Professor Gérard Gardner, Ph.D.

The Bélanger-Gardner Fund, established by the late Université de Montréal Professor Gérard Gardner, Ph.D., supports projects pertaining to the Eastern Townships. The Bélanger-Gardner Foundation provides grants to individuals, groups, or associations for projects on topics related to the Eastern Townships. Projects must comply with the following protocol:

“The income from the Fund shall be used to gather, to catalogue and to make available documents and other material relating to the discovery, the colonization, the industrial and commercial development and the evolution of the population of the Eastern Townships of Quebec.”

Project plans and budgets should be described in detail, and applicants should provide any information deemed relevant to the application. The application must indicate whether sources of funding have been sought for the same project and whether any other sources of funding are anticipated as the successful applicants may receive less than the full amount requested. The Committee will entertain requests for funding in 2024 up to $1,500.

Important: If you are submitting a project in French, please attach an English summary with your request.

All detailed projects must be submitted to the committee no later than Friday, March 15, 2024.

Please forward your requests to:

Bélanger-Gardner Foundation
c/o Mrs. Catherine Lavallée-Welch, University Librarian,
Chair, Bélanger-Gardner Foundation
Bishop’s University Library
2600 College St.
Sherbrooke, Québec  J1M 1Z7

Tel: 819-822-9600 ext. 2280

For more information, contact lstone@ubishops.ca.

ETRC – 2023 Grant Recipient

“Through the financial support of Bélanger-Gardner Foundation, the ETRC successfully completed the processing and description of the North Hatley Library Association fonds. An accrual to the fonds has now been integrated with the previously-processed materials, and file-level descriptions are available for the entire fonds in our online database, the Eastern Townships Archives Portal. This project has greatly increased the accessibility of this fonds, which serves as a source on the cultural, social, literary, and educational history of the Eastern Townships. The new materials, in particular, fill temporal gaps in the processed records of the Association. This project also allowed for the correction of inaccuracies in the existing descriptive metadata for the fonds. Researchers now have access to more accurate descriptions of our holdings to plan for future visits to the Archives.’’ — Jazmine Aldrich, ETRC Head Archivist

ETRC logo

TOWNSHIPS SUN – 2022 Grant Recipient

“The Archives Project saw the entire 50 years of its publication scanned and uploaded to the Bibliothèque et archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ), where they can be consulted free of charge. The archives are comprised of 525 issues, with a total of 14,135 pages (10,659 tabloid pages and 3,476 magazine-size pages).” “Our gratitude goes to the Bélanger-Gardner Foundation of the Bishop’s University Library for funding this project…” — Townships Sun Archives Project Press Release

Townships Sun

LOUISE ABBOTT – 2017 Grant Recipient

With the Foundation’s support, Ms. Abbott completed a film project on the Ayer’s Cliff Fair, one of Canada’s oldest country fairs originating in 1845. The documentary was broadcast on WNED PBS (Buffalo-Toronto) in February 2022.

“I’m very appreciative of the grant that the foundation provided… The funds bought me transportation to the fair, to the local archives and homes…They helped me to purchase archival visuals or borrow and digitize them. They also enabled me to get assistance from a fellow researcher and afforded me time to plan the film. Thank you for enabling me to embark on this wonderful project.” — Louise Abbott, Freelance Writer, Photographer,  Author, Documentary Filmmaker

Louise Abbott, Freelance Writer, Photographer,  Author, Documentary Filmmaker

Bélanger-Gardner Fund list of recipients from 2018 to 2023 (PDF)