She was soon accepted into the United World Colleges. She went to UWC Dilijan where she first learned about Projects for Peace, a program that supports innovative student-designed projects that can be implemented anywhere in the world.
Hayrumyan came to Hamilton in 2023 and was inspired to design a project to help her people back home. By this time, the president of Artsakh had signed a decree to dismantle the republic’s institutions. “[The Artsakh people] essentially became refugees,” she said. “There were profound disturbances in education. I wanted to do my best to fill the gap through more non-formal education practices.”
“When you’re 16 or 17 and you know that you can make a difference in your community, it fuels you.”
She received a $10,000 Project for Peace grant for the project Hooys: Planting Seeds of Hope in Artsakh Youth. Named after the Armenian word for hope, her project aimed to “catalyze personal, intellectual, and communal growth” among its 29 Artsakh refugee participants.
“I believe that without hope, there is no plan,” she said.
The project, which took place over the summer of 2024, consisted of three main components: a series of online workshops aimed at promoting self-development, a book distribution program, and three participant-led initiatives that allowed students to apply the skills they learned in workshops to positively impact their own communities.
“When you’re 16 or 17 and you know that you can make a difference in your community, it fuels you,” Hayrumyan said. “My intention was for them to see that their future is bright, and we need to start preparing for it.”
Posted September 15, 2025
