Karuna Appeal in North London – a glimpse behind the scenes

Khemajala, from the Karuna Trust's fundraising team, writes to FWBO News to say - “Readers of FWBO News might like to know we have a team of volunteers in North London right now. They’re walking the streets and talking to the good people of North London. Jo, Naomi, Abhilasa and Paddy are halfway through their six weeks of door-knocking appeal; please bear them in mind as they do this vital fundraising.“If all goes well they’ll raise many thousands between them for our many projects in India – last year we raised a remarkable £87,968 annually. And since most donations are by standing order, the money just keeps on flowing long after the appeal is over! “If you want to keep up with their story Jo Robinson is blogging away on most days on the Karuna Appeals blog. It makes great reading... Here’s a taste. 14th June: Cultivating passion"Hi, I'm calling from a charity". "You best come in then, but I'm telling you now I'm not signing up for a standing order"."I feel the warmth of the hallway and the house immediately, and realise that it is a little cold out there walking the streets. It is a familiar warmth to me, the warmth of being invited into someone's home, I am immediately grateful. My eyes scan the room, letters opened on the table, a work pass that says BBC on the counter. "Ah, you work for the BBC" "Yes", "what do you do there?" "I'm the World Services' Africa correspondent". Ah, I think, how interesting, we are going to get on well. "So, what do you want from me?" "Well, I'll tell you it straight there's no point in mucking around...I want a standing order...". I grin...he grins, "or a donation" I add, realising that this man is relatively rich and might give Karuna a big fat cheque."He tells me he had a Dalit cleaner when he lived in India. Tells me that the cook of the house said that if the cleaner was ever allowed in the kitchen of the house, she would resign as his cook. He tells me he hates Hinduism because it fosters this sense of when you're born you're screwed, you just have to put up with your lot…” Read more here...

India, Karuna, and advocacy work

The Karuna Trust is the FWBO’s largest and most successful fundraising charity, sending well over UK £1,000,000/year to a wide variety of projects in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Tibet. In recent years their focus has shifted from the approach of ‘Aid for India’ (their original name!) to encouraging projects that specialise in helping India’s disadvantaged peoples effectively and peacefully access their legal entitlements.

These naturally include India’s more than 200 million Dalits and Tribal people, from whom come the vast majority of India’s Buddhists, including of course members of the TBMSG. While India as a whole has become increasingly prosperous over the last decade, discrimination of all sorts is still rife, and especially discrimination based on the age-old and scripturally-sanctioned caste system.

Two such projects which have been funded by Karuna are the 'Dalit Rights Initiative' (a part of India’s ‘Human Rights Law Network') and ‘Social Jurist’. Both have hundreds, if not thousands, of stories to tell, and we have posted a few of these on the FWBO News Features page.

Ananta from Karuna comments “In spite of the harrowing content, the stories move towards a 'happy ending' which I found uplifting not least because our efforts are supporting this work. The full list of cases is available on their websites if you want to read more”.

There is a growing trend of ‘advocacy’ work that often uses the internet – Karuna’s attention was recently drawn to Meena Kandasamy’s blog, a 24-year–old Tamil woman who is self-confessedly “obsessed with revolutionary Dr.Ambedkar’s message of caste annihilation”. Her blog describes the punishments meted out to ‘dangerous Dalit women’ seen as witches by caste Hindus.

She ends with words that could almost have been written of the ‘witches’ and witchcraft trials of Briain and the US in earlier centuries: “…in witch-hunting, the victims are also single (read widowed/ deserted/ divorced) women of a certain age who are no longer burdened with reproductive duties. The word ‘witch’ is thrust on these ‘dangerous’ women who asserted their entitlement to rights and thus challenged patriarchal and caste supremacist diktats. Dalit or Adivasi (Tribal) women who dared to contest elections and directly challenged the political power of the landed caste-Hindus have been labeled hags. They have been accused of exercising black magic when in fact they have only been exercising their fundamental rights. Witchcraft, when used by brutal caste-Hindus in the modern context, has come to signify women’s resistance to oppression, and the price they have paid for it”.

Click here to read some of the full stories from the 'Dalit Rights Initiative' and ‘Social Jurist’ projects.

You can donate to Karuna via their website, www.karuna.org.

Fundraising successes and job opportunties at Karuna

It’s nearly the end of April and 2008 is soon to be 1/3rd gone - and over at the Karuna Trust they’ve been counting their pennies.

Karuna is the FWBO’s most successful fundraising charity: it raises over UK £1.5 million every year for a wide range of Dhamma and social projects in India and elsewhere in South Asia – both inside and outside the FWBO and TBMSG. And they have good news to report – Ādarsha, their Trust fundraiser, tells FWBO News -

“Karuna has raised over £118,000 to date this year from Trusts and Foundations. This money is for a number of specific projects working to tackle caste discrimination, enable women's empowerment and provide educational access for disadvantaged children.

“We were going ask FWBO News to run this story when we crossed the £100,000 mark – then the most recent donation, of £13,000, came in. This is for our women's empowerment project tackling incidents of caste-based violence in a particularly poor region of rural Maharashtra. It’s run by our partner SPMM who do great work with Dalits and Tribal people in India, helping them combat atrocities and discrimination through accessing legal provisions and protecting their statutory entitlements to education and legal protection. You can read some of the latest – and quite shocking - news from this project on Global Giving , an American internet fundraising site that Karuna use. And click here for a fuller list of Karuna’s Global Giving projects.

“This money is of course in addition to the regular donations from Karuna’s network of more than 5,000 donors from all over the UK”.

Karuna Job opportunities
Karuna has grown substantially in recent years, and the Karuna team in London have a number of job opportunities coming up. Check our sister site FWBO Jobs for the details: they represent a great opportunity to get involved if you want to give real practical help to the ‘Dhamma Revolution’ in India.

Karuna's success with new fundraising initiatives

The FWBO’s Karuna Trust has teamed up with Global Giving, at www.globalgiving.com, a US-based website which describes itself as an ‘eBay for international development’, and is in fact run by the former ‘eBay for Charity’ chief Sharath Jeevan.

Visitors to the site can choose to donate to a list of grassroots projects, some run by local NGOs and some by larger development charities: Karuna have already raised US $7,000 from the scheme for two projects. A UK-based Global Giving website will be launching in Spring 2008.

One of Karuna’s Global Giving projects is helping Dalit 'low-caste' village women combat exploitation; a second aims focuses upon stopping Child-Labour in workhouses where the children are forced to make cheap 'bidis' (the local word for cigarettes). Both provide direct assistance to Karuna’s main partner community in India, the Dalits. Click either link for more information or to donate.

One of the features of the Globalgiving approach is that it enables supporters to direct money to a specific project that they can then follow, as donors get emailed updates on the project at regular intervals.

Globalgiving is part of a wider strategy at Karuna of broadening out their search for funds; over the past five years they have rapidly expanded the number of partner organisations in India (see previous FWBO News report on the 2007 Karuna partners conference in India) while at the same time, it has been harder to find volunteers for door-to-door fundraising even as that approach has itself become increasingly competitive in the UK. This has put Karuna’s finances under some strain, especially as most fundraising these days brings in what is known as ‘restricted income’, ie income that can only be used for one specific project.

Karuna were therefore delighted with their recent ‘upgrade mailout’, an appeal to most of their 5,000 regular donors in the UK to consider increasing their regular donations; this resulted in no less than UK £35,000/year additional income, almost all of which will be used to benefit TBMSG projects in India – these have traditionally been funded from Karuna’s door-knocking appeals ie ‘unrestricted income’.

Many of the TBMSG Trusts in India are currently shifting onto ‘project-based financing’, which will open the doors for them to raise funds in many more arenas – we hope to bring more news of this soon.

Karuna still have some vacancies for their appeals in 2008, please check the Karuna Appeals website or their Appeals blog for some first-hand accounts by volunteers on past appeals. They offer a generous support package and full training. You can also contact them direct on +44(0)207 700 3434 or email the Karuna Appeals Team for more information

Green Tara Trust wins funding for major social project in Nepal

The FWBO's Karuna Trust have succeeded in fundraising a donation of £32,819 for a project in rural Nepal run by Dharmacharini Karunamati. Her Green Tara Trust exists to help mothers, infants and young people in a region recently ravaged by civil war and where health conditions are amongst the worst in the world.

The project will be tackling some of the effects of the civil war - poverty, poor access to (and destruction of) health facilities, the death toll (over 13,000 lives have been lost since 1996) and the flight of medical professionals – all of which have contributed to high maternal and infant mortality, plus high incidences of sexual violence, HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. There are now only 5 doctors for 100,000 people, compared to 216 in the UK. You can read more about some of the background and Green Tara’s involvement here.

The project itself provides a long-term community-based response to the rural health crisis; educating and helping people to help themselves. In particular it aims to improve maternal and infant health and decrease mortality, and to improve young people’s sexual health. It also encourages support and understanding for women and young people in a very patriarchal and hierarchal society, advocating changes to the health system, both locally and nationally, through links with the Nepali government and universities.

More specifically, the project will educate mothers about maternal and child health through group training, a mentoring system, and through providing clean delivery kits and post-natal checks. It will provide sexual health education to young people and encourage behaviour change through setting up peer-led groups and media campaigns. It will train health staff and local volunteers and guide and support the community in advocacy and also work with local GPs, government officials and local NGOs to improve health services and re-write the national health education curriculum. In total it is estimated that the project will directly benefit 5,500 people, predominantly women and teenagers, and indirectly over 100,000 people.

Karuna Appeals Report 2007

FWBO News is delighted to present this detailed report from Jo, from the FWBO’s Karuna Trust, on some of their fundraising successes this year. Karuna raises and sends over £1m every year to many different projects in India, it is one of the Movement’s greatest success stories.

Jo writes -

“We would like to tell you how the Karuna door-knocking Appeals have been doing over this last year. A lot has happened for us in the last twelve months, which isn’t unusual here on the Appeals Team!

Jo and Santavajri started the year with a visit to India, where they saw quite a range of Karuna-funded projects and attended the first ever Karuna Partners Conference at Nagaloka in Nagpur (see photo, which shows Santavajri and Jo role-play door-knocking at Karuna's Partners' Conference in February).

Back at the Karuna office in London, Jo, Manjuka and Santavajri were joined in February by two new team members, Khemajala and Peter Hunt. The new team then went on to run six appeals, which was one less than planned… Recruitment of volunteers is proving more difficult these days. So if you think you may be interested in doing an Appeal then find out more at www.karunaappeals.org.uk/ and look out for posters, postcards and booklets giving you lots more information at a Buddhist Centre near you. Then get in touch! OK – end of advert.

The Appeals Team has continued to evolve over the year, with Manjuka leaving as Team Leader in October, and Santavajri stepping into his shoes. Manjuka has been fundraising and leading appeals since 1998, has made many thousands of pounds for Karuna’s projects in India, led dozens of appeals, and skilfully supported innumerable men and women through the ups and downs of fundraising. At times, he has been virtually the only person on the Appeals Team, and on more than once occasion has led two Appeals simultaneously! He has been a real stalwart, displaying so much courage, commitment and determination during some challenging times, as well as keeping his playful, soft and kindly side very much alive. We in the FWBO and TBMSG owe him a great deal, so if you see Manjuka, do congratulate him on all he has done over the last 9 years, and don’t let him get away with being Scottish and diffident – make sure he takes it on the chin!!

Other changes on the Team: once the Appeals season got under way, Peter realised that door-knocking wasn’t for him, and he has since left the Appeals Team. So we are looking to replace him with a male fundraiser/trainer in 2008. Please see the jobs section on FWBO News for more information. Another advert! How did that slip in??

Jo led an Appeal for the first time in 2007, and proved to be a competent and able leader. Indeed, the Bristol Women’s Appeal was the highest-earner this year, coming in 6% over target. Sadhu to Jo, and to the women on the Appeal!

We continue to have excellent input on the Appeals from Jayachitta (famous for her Red Noeses Unlimited clowning workshops) and Manjusvara, and Manjuka will stay involved as a visiting trainer in 2008. Manjudeva and Vandanajyoti also offered valuable sessions in Focussing and Dharma Study respectively in 2007.

More about the Appeals themselves: We raised a total of £87,968 annually, which was slightly less than 2006, but more than 2004 and 2005. The Appeals did quite well, with 4 coming in comfortably on target, and two slightly below. 30 people fundraised on the Appeals, comprising a total of 171 fundraising weeks. We in the Appeals Team accounted for 25% of the fundraising weeks, which is on average 5% more than over the past five years… so we are working hard!!

We ran two mixed Appeals in 2007: one for the team of Dharmaduta students, and another in London. We also had a range of nationalities involved, including one German, a Dutch woman, and two Indians.

Here are the names of people who did the Appeals in 2007 and the amount each Appeal raised. Again, if you know any of these people, do congratulate them for giving of their time, energy and effort so generously. We couldn’t have done it without them… as Manjusvara says, our volunteer fundraisers are Karuna’s Secret Weapon, and our most precious resource!

Appeal Results:
Leeds Women
Main Trainer: Santavajri. Fundraisers: Jo Goldsmid, Jo Robinson, Santavajri. Visiting Trainers: Manjuka, Manjusvara, Jayachitta, Manjudeva. Amount raised: £8,729 (annual standing order value)
Edinburgh Men
Main Trainer: Manjuka. Fundraisers: Khemajala, Peter Hunt, Sasanajyoti, David Vasey, Karunajala. Visiting Trainers: Santavajri, Jo Goldsmid, Manjusvara, Manjudeva, Jayachitta. Amount raised: £16,624.
London Dharmaduta Students
Main Trainer: Manjuka. Fundraisers: Manidhamma, Will Sullivan, Thea Wiersma, Sunayaka, Matt Burgess. Visiting Trainers: Jayachitta, Manjusvara, Manjudeva, Jo Goldsmid, Peter Hunt, Khemajala, Santavajri. Amount raised: £14,346.
London Mixed
Main Trainer: Santavajri. Fundraisers: Khemajala, Santosh Kamble, Jo Goldsmid, Vicki Clarke, Peter Hunt, Sraddhagita. Visiting Trainers: Manjusvara, Jayachitta, Manjuka, Vandanajyoti, Jayaraja, Abhilasa. Amount raised: £18,609
Bristol Women
Main Trainer: Jo Goldsmid. Fundraisers: Subhadramati, Katannuta, Julia Simnett, Amitasuri, Vishvantara, Rachel Caddick. Visiting Trainers: Santavajri, Manjuka, Jayachitta, Manjusvara. Amount raised: £17,411.
S. E. London Men
Main Trainer: Manjuka. Fundraisers: Kevin Moore, Karunavajra, Peter Hannah, James Corre. Visiting Trainers: Jayachitta, Manjusvara, Santavajri, Manjudeva. Amount raised: £12, 251.

Sadhu Karuna! If you're interested in doing an appeal next year, contact them or phone +44 (0)20 7700 3434. See also their current jobs advert on FWBO Jobs.

Karuna windfall gratefully received

The FWBO's Karuna Trust have received an anonymous donation of US $97,000 for the SAATHI Street children's project in Mumbai (Bombay). Saathi is one of Karuna’s non-Buddhist partners, but one with whom they have a long-standing and positive relationship. As part of this they have for some time been funding Saathi’s ‘Invisible Girl’ project. This is a response to the widespread phenomenon in India of ‘railway children’. The windfall donation coincided with a visit to Mumbai and the railway projects by London's mayor Ken Livingston, click here for some press reports.

The following is taken from a report by Adarsha, one of Karuna’s fundraisers, on a visit there last year.

“In Bombay we visited Saathi. We went to Bombay Central station where the young people and girls turn up in the city. The task of the project workers is to get to them before the agents of the brothels and the domestic work networks do. Impressively they have done a lot of outreach work with station staff, police, stall holders, platform kids and groups who live in the station, explaining the situation facing the children who turn up alone at the station, and getting them to help. Whereas before the police were completely unhelpful they have now had trainings about their responsibilities under the Juvenile Justice Act 2000, and whilst the relationship is variable the police are more supportive than they were. The other groups mentioned used to prey on the girls themselves, and the awareness work has helped to encourage them to bring the girls to Saathi.

“We also visited the day centre Saathi runs where the girls get education and vocational skills. I was very impressed by their confidence and articulacy - the dedicated efforts of the team, including a psychotherapist, who have been focusing on building the girls' confidence seems to be working. It surprised me how clear the girls were about what they wanted to be - doctor, soldier, social worker - and more so that it didn't seem to be just pipe-dreams, but they realised some of what they needed to do to get there. I subsequently found out that this is an area the Saathi team particularly focus upon.

“As my Hindi has just about reached a semi-fluent level I could talk to the girls directly - as I could with the platform kids and station police and staff in Bihar (where Karuna fund a similar project called Gaya Rescue Junction, run by People First) . This has made such a huge difference to getting a felt sense of the work and building a connection and rapport with the project staff and beneficiaries. And also means that I can tell whether the translator is doing a spin - for example in Bihar when we talked to the station staff several of them clearly didn't know anything about the project, which we might have missed if I hadn't been talking to them directly!”

Karuna women's appeal in local paper

A women's Karuna appeal is in full swing in Bristol, UK - and was recently interviewed for a local Bristol paper. Under the heading 'DEVOTING ALL THEIR TIME TO FIGHTING PREJUDICE', the paper recounted how the women "spend their days praying, meditating and fund-raising" and quoted Amitasuri as saying "If my heart is open, we can meet with one another. Last night I was very moved by people's kindness, with people's honesty with me". It's a little unusual for Karuna's appeals to 'go public' in this way, but the reporter was clearly moved by what she saw.

Karuna's door-knocking appeals raise just over UK 1 million pounds/year for Dhamma and social work in India, and are a unique way to combine spiritual practice with effective and meaningful work for the benefit of others - Buddhist Right Livelihood in the very best sense.

Karuna's appeal dates for 2008 have been released and are on the Karuna Appeals website.

Meanwhile the Karuna Trust itself has a brand-new website, and very handsome it is too!

Dates for Karuna Appeals 2008

The dates for the Karuna Appeals in 2008 have just been released on www.appeals.karuna.org

Peter Hunt from the Karuna ofice says "If you have always thought ‘I would really love to do one of those Appeals’, then maybe 2008 is the year for you to do it. It is an opportunity to raise money for some of the most marginalized people on Earth while experiencing community living and taking your Dharma practice onto the streets. This is a breadth of practice that is hard to find in many other contexts; so why not take the plunge? Visit our website for more info about Appeals."

The dates are:
Spring Appeals
Men’s Appeal: 6th April – 17th May Brighton
Women’s Appeal: 6th April - 17th May Newcastle

Summer Appeals
Men’s Appeal: 8th June – 19th July London
Women’s Appeal: 8th June 19th July London

Autumn Appeal
Mixed Appeal: 7th September – 19th October Oxford

The Karuna Trust team send a total of over £1,000,000/year to social and Dharma projects in India; they are one of the great success stories of the FWBO. Much of their money is raised in these door-knocking appeals, which have pioneered a unique and effective approach to fundraising as a spiritual practice. The appeals website contains several ‘blogs’ from former fundraisers where you can read how they got on and the many challenges they faced.

FWBO Karuna Trust Partners' Conference

February 14th – 16th saw the first Karuna partner conference at Nagaloka in Nagpur, Maharashtra.

Almost all of the Karuna Trust's 45 project partners attended- one hundred delegates in all- NGOs and projects from all over India and beyond, working in a very wide range of fields. The title of the conference was “Towards a shared vision of Social change”. Our aim was to bring people together to share experiences and to establish a sense of working together towards a common vision.

Introducing the event, Karuna Director Suddhaka said “This conference is the realization of a long held dream for us. For many years we have been developing links with groups doing effective and inspiring grass roots work in many different parts of India. Now our hope is that by bringing these groups together we can play a small part in building a movement for social change.”

The three day program included talks on such themes as education, caste and Buddhism; presentations on Karuna and the way it raises money; and lastly skill sharing on subjects such as IT, management and planning, and dealing effectively with government.

The key points that emerged were that India is changing very rapidly and is no longer seen by donors as a very poor country. At the same time the issues facing poor communities are as serious as ever. As a result Karuna sees the need to make a shift from funding service provision; to a mixture of service provision, capacity building, advocacy and network building.

The final session looked at specific strengths and suggestions for improvement for both Karuna and its partners; a number of useful points were made in an atmosphere of considerable mutual appreciation. There was a tangible sense of a ‘family’ of partners emerging, all the more pleasing as many had not met one another before – and it was very much hoped that all sorts of ‘cross-fertilisation’ and mutually beneficial contacts would be developed over the months to come.

All three nights saw cultural programs, by Ashvaghosa, children from a local TBMSG community centre and kindergarten, and a group of drummers, dancers and actors from Tamil Nadu.

Karuna would like to thank everyone involved in organizing and co-ordinating the conference. Thanks especially to the Nagaloka and Jambudvipa teams who worked hard to make the event run smoothly- to Jane Goldsmith who facilitated the event and brought many creative ideas - to all our speakers and workshop leaders and to all our partners who came and participated in a wholehearted way.