To celebrate and support Black students who embody academic excellence, leadership, and a commitment to community development, University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) alumnus, Ekpeno John Ukut, has launched a $1,000 award for deserving candidates.

Ukut, who earned his Master’s degree in International Studies in 2024, designed the scholarship to recognize full-time or part-time undergraduate and graduate students who identify as Black and who not only excel academically but also contribute to building inclusive and equitable communities within and beyond the university.

There is a kind of generosity that resists spectacle, no gala dinners, no naming rights, no viral headlines. Just a door opening, a hand extended, and a decision made in private that changes a life, and eventually, a generation. For more than twenty years, Ekpeno Ukut has been making such decisions.

His story began with someone else’s kindness. As a young student in Nigeria, short on rent and desperate for help, he needed ₦25,000 but had only ₦10,000. He knocked on a professor’s door. Without lecture or condition, the professor handed him ₦40,000. That moment of unadorned generosity stayed with him, not because it solved a financial crisis, but because it revealed the true nature of giving: its greatest power lies in silence.

Now based in Canada, Ukut leads global initiatives through The Andino Foundation for Community Development (TAFCOD), which he founded in 2021. The foundation avoids the trappings of performative philanthropy. Instead, it funds clean water projects in underserved Nigerian communities, supports families facing structural poverty and health challenges, and invests in youth programs that treat young people as assets to be nurtured rather than problems to be managed.

Since 2024, TAFCOD has awarded cash prizes at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, honoring top graduates in Theatre and Performing Arts through the Andino Excellence Award. In a country where educational prestige is often reserved for medicine, law, engineering, and economics, this choice is a bold statement: the arts matter. They are how societies remember themselves. As Ukut puts it, “The arts are not a luxury. They are how a society remembers itself.”

In 2026, he expanded his vision with the Ekpeno Ukut Equity Award, a scholarship for Black students in Canada who demonstrate academic achievement, leadership, and community commitment. Designed as a recurring fixture rather than a one-off gesture, the award quietly reshapes lives year after year.

What sets Ukut apart in the crowded landscape of philanthropy is his refusal to chase recognition. He is not interested in the story, only in the outcome. And in a world where giving is often a performance, that makes his approach extraordinarily rare.