Ed. Foundation Receives Generous $55K Gift from Singh Family, ECMC Fdtn.

The Northern Virginia Community College Educational Foundation (NOVA Foundation) announced a generous gift of $55,000 to the NOVA COVID-19 Emergency Student Aid Fund (‘the Fund’) from the ECMC Foundation and the Community Foundation for Northern Virginia through the efforts of Mr. K. Paul Singh, CEO of Rezon8 Capital & Advisory Group. Mr. Singh was made aware of the NOVA Fund by his daughter, Anjuli, an adjunct faculty member at NOVA’s Loudoun Campus and an executive at Rezon8 Capital. The gift consists of both a grant from the Community Foundation for Northern Virginia as well as a direct gift from the ECMC Foundation.

“Paul and Anjuli Singh represent the best of NOVA – ‘family helping family’ – to ensure our students persist against every challenge to succeed at NOVA,” said Dr. Anne Kress, president of Northern Virginia Community College. “I am grateful that our extended network is committed to helping our most financially vulnerable students during this unprecedented time.”

Ms. Anjuli M. Singh is an adjunct professor who teaches film studies and film history at both the Annandale and Loudoun campuses. Very passionate about the field, her work started with studying film history. Her family values education and considers it a top priority.

She attended Johns Hopkins University for her Bachelor’s in Film in Media Studies and for a Master’s in Museum Studies. She then pursued a second Master’s in Cinema Studies from New York University. She started her career out of college working in film production in Los Angeles, and has worked on big studio projects as well as independent projects. She has further worked at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the Museum of the Moving Image in New York and the American Film Institute.

Singh feels that her extensive film background contributes a lot to her credibility as a professor as she is able to give advice and guidance based on her own experience. She loves being able to bring more knowledge and excitement about projects in the classroom.

Although she has lived all over, she has mostly called Northern Virginia her home, and currently resides in Sterling. She has always known about NOVA, and had even taken summer courses while at Johns Hopkins. She remembered that the professors she had at NOVA truly cared about the subjects they taught. It resonated with her that they were passionate and wanted to share that knowledge.

The transition to teaching took her back to when she worked in museum settings. She was comfortable giving presentations to general members of the public. She really enjoyed sharing what she found special about film history, so she currently shares that now with students. For NOVA, she enjoys that there are students who are right out of high school as well as adult learners (some of whom who are getting degrees for the first time, and some of those who have already earned degrees and want to change career paths).

Recently, she has been excited that NOVA has a new Associate in Fine Arts in Cinema program and hopes for the same to come to Loudoun. She loves that schools are adopting these film-specific programs. To her, film is a subject where everyone can relate to it as an academic discipline or not. She likes hearing student comments on film history, and always aims to teach her classes at a collegiate level. If students leave NOVA and go to a four-year school for film, she wants them to leave with the highest caliber of education in film.

This current period of remote teaching was somewhat stressful for her. She wanted to deliver the information in the best possible manner. But she did have some online learning experience recently through her master’s program in Museum Studies, and she and her students adapted quickly.

She realized immediately that if she was stressed out about teaching the class, then the students were going to be as well. She knew that some students wouldn’t even have online learning experience prior to COVID-19. She also knew that a lot of students were living in difficult circumstances; and with the pandemic there would be a variety of needs. So, when she initially received the All Staff email for the emergency student aid fund, she immediately passed  the information along to her father who was very excited about the opportunity to help NOVA, and immediately took action.

Mr. K. Paul Singh and his wife have a family foundation, and at the end of every year, they give money to different nonprofits. It varies year by year based on the current need. Also, he is an active member of the board for ECMC, and in recent years, since he started that board position, he became more interested in education and serving underserved students.

He immediately requested that the money contributed from his family foundation to the Northern Virginia Community Foundation be earmarked for NOVA students. Further, each ECMC board member is permitted to allocate a contribution from the company to the foundation of their choice, and Singh requested his 2020 funds be sent to NOVA’s Foundation.

For Anjuli, when it came to her students, she wanted them to continue forward in their studies in these difficult times.

“I hope this allows students who are dedicated to their education to not lose time,” she said. “I didn’t want any student to drop out for even a semester or two. They might not be able to take a full course load, but I didn’t want them to lose hope.”