Dear ALTA community,

I am honored, as a past president of ALTA, to report to you, ALTA’s members, of a milestone for our association. For many years now, Alexis Levitin, whom many of you may know through his leadership in the Bilingual Readings program at the annual conference, has been making regular donations to the ALTA endowment. This December, his donations came to a total of $200,000. He has decided to complete his gift with this substantial figure.

While there have been other gifts to the endowment—notably $40,000 raised for the endowment during ALTA’s 40th anniversary in 2018—it is Alexis’s donations that have anchored ALTA’s financial security through the compounding of interest and the great care ALTA’s financial managers have taken in overseeing our investment accounts. As of December 2024, the ALTA endowment stood at more than $665,000. As ALTA is incorporated as a non-profit organization in Texas (as it was founded there in 1978), we are subject to Texas non-profit law, which requires us to spend 4% of our endowment every year for the advancement of our mission as an association. Currently this means that the endowment is adding over $20,000 to our operations budget annually.

When Alexis and I discussed his wishes for where the money raised from the endowment might be directed, his request was to increase the National Translation Awards in Prose and Poetry from $2,500, the level set in 2014, to bring them closer to the privately financed awards ALTA also administers, such as the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize ($10,000), the Italian Prose in Translation Award ($5,000), and the Spain-USA foundation Translation Award ($5,000). Last year, in response to his request, the National Translation Awards in Poetry and Prose were each increased to $4,000, and the goal is to raise them each to $5,000 as soon as the budget allows.

We hope that releasing this information will help ALTA’s members to see that an endowment is not merely an accumulation of abstract numbers, but it is the incarnation of the belief of our donors in our shared vision of the beauty and depth of feeling that languages offer our human family.

Thank you, Alexis!

Warm regards to all,
Ellen Elias-Bursac