As we enter a new age of mass communication, social interaction, and activism fueled by the internet, it is clear that organizations such as the Armenian Youth Federation, with a purpose to unite, engage and educate, must be better equipped to those ends. This calls for an effective means of upholding the identity and ideals that we stand for on the internet.

With that in mind, for the past several months, the AYF has been collaborating with designers and developers to revamp its primary outlet for news, events, and advocacy. The result is the contemporary design and feature set that we are unveiling today.

Welcome to the new website for the Armenian Youth Federation – Western Region!

This update adds many features and makes some key changes in the way you interact with AYF – WR online.

First, we’ve developed a simplified and fluid experience to help you engage with the AYF – WR’s most popular programs: the AYF Youth Corps and Haytoug websites have been merged with the main site. All the content from the old sites has been migrated and is accessible on the new site. The application process for AYF Youth Corps will remain unchanged.

You can find information on AYF Youth Corps here and keep up with the Youth Corps blog here. Similarly, articles from the Haytoug can be found here.

Combining the websites serves another ultimate purpose: maintaining a single, efficient archive of all AYF activity through news, publications and photos. With this website, we have taken a huge leap forward by creating unified archives for all three, consolidating the many of each that had been scattered across the former websites.

An ever-growing archive of every news update — article, editorial, blog, etc. — ever published online through AYF – WR can be found here. Additionally, you’ll notice that the publication date of this article, shown above, are clickable links. Clicking the month of publication (in the case of this article, August) will take you to the archive of the month in which that post was published. Clicking the year of publication (2014 for this article) will take you to the yearly archive, where you can select a month to view. This makes it easier than ever to traverse the AYF – WR’s vast article archive.

The AYF – WR’s sole print publication, the Haytoug, is a staple among the community. We’ve already mentioned how to view articles from Haytoug magazine on our website. Many will be happy to know that we will continue to offer PDFs of all of our previous issues, dating back as far as 1978! You can view the Haytoug PDF archive here.

A large database of photos from our various events and programs has accumulated over the years. Between AYF Youth Corps and Western Region events/programs, there are nearly 22,000 total images available on the web. You can browse the image library here.

Authors and contributors to our news section will now have their own pages on our website, featuring all of their published articles. You can read about the contributor and also visit their Twitter account, if applicable. Click on my name (Purag Moumdjian) in the top bar, under the article’s title, to be taken to my author page.

We understand that a lot of the web is accessed through mobile phones and tablets nowadays. We want to make sure that we can preserve our image and offer you the same content, no matter which device you’re browsing from. That’s why our website is now fully optimized for mobile and tablet viewing. You can also share every part of the website to your friends and followers on every popular social network by clicking the “share button at the bottom of every page.

We believe that these features, along with the fresh design and social integration that we have built, will help viewers engage with the AYF and its programs more effectively than ever before. Please comment below with your thoughts, and don’t forget to share this!

Founded in 1933, the Armenian Youth Federation is the largest and most influential Armenian American youth organization in the United States, working to advance the social, political, educational and cultural awareness of Armenian-American youth.