Tag Archives: India

Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi and Kim Behan Win Prestigious Award

Posted on October 28, 2021 by | Comments Off on Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi and Kim Behan Win Prestigious Award

By Carla Prater

Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

This month our Chairperson, Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi, and Executive Director, Kim Behan jointly received the prestigious Dr. Ambedkar Prabuddha Bharata Peace Award, granted by a Buddhist organization in India called the Nagarjuna Training Institute. The institute, based at Nagaloka in Nagpur, continues the heritage of Engaged Buddhism started by the Dalit leader, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956).

For those who do not know of him, Dr. Ambedkar was an Indian jurist, economist, and social reformer who rose up from poverty to become one of the foremost leaders of independent India. He was born into a poor family of the Dalit community, the people previously referred to by caste Hindus as “Untouchables”—those whose very shadow was considered inauspicious and whose touch was thought to pollute. In his youth, Ambedkar suffered the indignities inflicted upon Dalits by reason of their birth, but he was a bright and diligent student who overcame the obstacles he faced in pursuit of his education. He excelled in his studies and went on to earn two doctorate degrees, from Columbia Univerity and the London School of Economics. After independence, he became India’s first Minister of Law and Justice and the principal author of the Indian Constitution.

Dr. Ambedkar deeply opposed the Hindu caste system, with its degrading treatment of the Dalits, and he vowed that though he was born a Hindu, he would not die one. He embarked on a thorough study of the world’s major religions and in the end decided that Buddhism best met his aspirations. On October 15, 1956, at a large ceremony in Nagpur, he formally undertook the Three Refuges and Five Precepts, the twin gateway to the Dharma. Immediately afterward he led 500,000 Dalits in renouncing their Hindu heritage and adopting Buddhism.

Sadly, just two months after his conversion, Ambedkar died due to chronic poor health. But the revolution he started continued to roll on. In the years and decades following the initial mass conversion ceremony, millions of Dalits have followed Dr. Ambedkar in embracing Buddhism, and thus in India today there is a large Buddhist population drawn mainly from the Dalit community. Nagaloka in Nagpur is one of their primary religious and educational centers.

The Nagarjuna Training Institute (NTI) was established at Nagaloka to provide training in Buddhist teachings to young Buddhists from all over India. After completing the training program, the trainees return to their home communities to help in propagating Buddhism. Through its programs the institute strives to promote the ideal of Prabuddha Bharat—an Enlightened India—and to play a part in the global Buddhist family. 

Every year the institute confers the Dr. Ambedkar Prabuddha Bharata Peace Award, which it presents on October 15, the anniversary of Dr. Ambedkar’s embrace of Buddhism. This date is also considered the anniversary of King Ashoka’s conversion to Buddhism. The Peace Award is presented “to those who have made significant contributions to the development of Buddhism and the welfare of humanity, not only in India, but throughout the world.” This year the award committee saw fit to confer the award on Bhante and Kim Behan—to Bhante for his scholarship and contributions to human welfare through BGR and to Kim for her role as executive director of BGR.

The time that the celebration of the mass conversion ceremony took place in India was too late for Bhante to join online, so he recorded an acceptance speech, which was played at the ceremony. But Kim, in Colorado, participated online and submitted a short address, which will soon be published on the BGR blog. In accepting the award, Kim writes: “I would like to share the Dr. Ambedkar Peace Award with the entire team at Buddhist Global Relief in recognition of our work together in the Dharma.”

Carla Prater is Assistant Director of Buddhist Global Relief.

 

 

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Posted in Awards and honors, Engaged Buddhism, News item, Social justice

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BGR Offers Emergency Assistance during the Pandemic

Posted on May 27, 2021 by | Comments Off on BGR Offers Emergency Assistance during the Pandemic

By BGR Staff

In May 2021, BGR donated over $60,000 from our emergency funds to support communities, both globally and in the U.S., adversely impacted by the Covid pandemic. Most of our assistance has gone to organizations working in India, which has been hit especially hard by the pandemic.

Photo: International Medical Corps

In May 2021, BGR donated over $60,000 from our emergency funds to support communities, both globally and in the U.S., adversely impacted by the Covid pandemic. Most of our assistance has gone to organizations working in India, which has been hit especially hard by the pandemic.

BGR began its emergency assistance to India on May 6th with a donation of $6,000 divided as follows among four organizations:

  • $2,000 to CARE India, to provide essential hospital services, health workers, beds, oxygen supply, and more.
  • $2,000 to the International Medical Corps, which is working with its partners in India to meet the most urgent health needs, including medical supplies, personal protective equipment, sanitation, and hygiene supplies.
  • $1,000 to Ketto, a fund-raising platform in Mumbai, to purchase oxygen concentrators.
  • $1,000 to Akshaya Patra Foundation, which is providing food to thousands of needy people across India.

Shortly after making this donation, BGR received an extremely generous donation from an individual donor in the amount of $20,000, for which we are deeply grateful. This was distributed to five organizations, in the amount of $4,000 each. The five beneficiaries were:

  • UNICEF-USA,  the US branch of the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund, to ensure that children around the world are vaccinated against Covid-19.
  • World Food Program USA, to provide urgently needed food aid to Yemen and the Central African Republic.
  • CARE India, for emergency medical relief, in addition to the $2,000 given earlier.
  • Akshaya Patra Foundation, for food assistance, in addition to the $1,000 given earlier.
  • Cambodian League for Promotion of Human Rights (LICADHO), to provide food and hygiene supplies to women and their young children in Cambodian prisons.

On May 16th the BGR Board decided to donate an additional $1,000 to UNICEF-USA, the World Food Program USA, and LICADHO, to bolster their donations to $5,000 each. CARE India and Akshaya Patra had already received additional funding under our earlier donation.

At its meeting on May 16th, the Board agreed to provide $2,500 in emergency assistance to the Karuna Trust, a social service organization in Sri Lanka, to provide parcels of dry food rations to poor families left desperate and hungry because of the pandemic.

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Dry rations distribution by Karuna Trust

The Board also decided to offer a donation of $5,000 to UNRWA-USA, the U.S. branch of the UN relief agency assisting Palestinian refugees. The organization is currently providing shelter, food assistance, health care, and other life-enhancing programs to Palestinians in Gaza left hungry and often homeless on account of the recent Israeli air raids.

In mid-May, Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi wrote to his friend, Ven. Bhante Ananda, general secretary of the Maha Bodhi Society, Bengaluru, to inquire about the condition of the monastery in Bengaluru, where he taught in 2019. The Maha Bodhi Maitri Mandala, the humanitarian service wing of the Maha Bodhi Society, operates a hospital in Bengaluru. Bhante Ananda wrote back to Ven. Bodhi to inform him that the hospital desperately needed five ventilators, each costing almost $10,000. They had received funds from supporters in Switzerland for one ventilator, but needed funds for the other four.

Ven. Bodhi proposed that BGR provide funds for a ventilator; a donation of $10,000 from the Buddhist Association of the United States (BAUS) to BGR enabled us to cover the costs of a second ventilator. Ven. Bodhi requested his publisher, Wisdom Publications, to donate for a third ventilator. And Indian Buddhists living in the greater New York area offered to raise funds for the fourth ventilator. In this way, by May 21st, the Mahabodhi Maitri Mandala had acquired the funds needed to purchase the four ventilators, which would be used to preserve the lives of their hospital patients.

Ventilators at the Maha Bodhi Hospital in Bengaluru
donated with help from BGR

Finally, on May 19th, BGR provided an emergency donation of $2,500 to the Foundation of His Sacred Majesty, an organization in India that renders services to the poor, deserving, and needy section of the Indian population without distinctions of caste, creed, race, sex, or religion. The Foundation urgently required outside assistance to help provide Covid relief.

In addition to these international donations, BGR continues to provide a monthly contribution of $3,000 to Feeding America, an umbrella organization supporting U.S. food banks, and a $500 monthly donation to the food program of Empty Cloud Monastery in West Orange, New Jersey.

As much as we lament the devastation that the Covid pandemic has brought to so many communities around the world, and the grief it has inflicted on countless families that have lost loved ones, we feel privileged to be able to offer tangible relief in the form of food supplies and medical aid and thereby save the lives of people who might have otherwise succumbed to illness or despair. We thank all of our donors for making this assistance possible, and we hope they rejoice in the good they make possible through their generosity.

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Posted in Buddhist social ethics, Covid-19, Emergency relief, Engaged Buddhism, Projects & programs

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Building Bridges for Poor Widows in the Punjab

Posted on May 1, 2019 by | Comments Off on Building Bridges for Poor Widows in the Punjab

By BGR Staff

Building Bridges India represents a bridge from the past to the future, from a patriarchal society to an egalitarian one in which women have role options, rights and responsibilities; a passage from despair to hope.

For over thirty years now, parts of Punjab have been stricken by a tragedy barely reported in the mainstream media: the suicides of small-scale farmers. A fatal combination of factors, including successive seasons of bad weather, the soaring cost of seeds and fertilizer, a falling water table, and the usurious rates imposed by moneylenders, have combined to make it impossible for them to sustain themselves on their ancestral lands. Seeing no way out, thousands have taken their own lives. Their deaths are tragedy enough. But for the widows and children they leave behind, life becomes a desperate struggle simply to survive.

Untrained, often illiterate and malnourished, burdened with their husbands’ debts yet without any way of earning an income, the women left behind–sometimes older, sometimes quite young–are responsible for housing and feeding themselves, their children and sometimes elderly relatives as well. Continue reading →

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Posted in Agriculture, Ending global poverty, Engaged Buddhism, Food security, Projects & programs, Women's livelihood

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Helping Indian Dalit Girls Rise Up and Shine: The Mission of the Bodhicitta Foundation

Posted on January 5, 2019 by | Comments Off on Helping Indian Dalit Girls Rise Up and Shine: The Mission of the Bodhicitta Foundation

By Patricia Brick

The Bodhicitta Foundation provides schooling and job training, legal assistance, social justice and women’s rights education, and other services to impoverished Dalit women and girls in Nagpur, India. Founded by the Australian Buddhist nun Ayya Yeshe, the foundation operates a girls’ hostel and a women’s job training and community center in slum areas of Nagpur. A three-year Buddhist Global Relief grant supports both of these projects.

The Dalits in India–the people formerly known as “outcasts” or “untouchables”–have historically been relegated to jobs considered “below” even the members of society’s lowest caste.; Their work traditionally involved such tasks as cleaning or processing human waste or animal carcasses. Women and girls in this group face additional gender-specific burdens including domestic violence and child marriage. An estimated 30 percent of Indian women experience physical or sexual domestic violence in their lifetimes, according to the U.N.’s Global Database on Violence Against Women. More than a quarter of Indian girls are married by age 18, and 7 percent are married by age 15.

The Bodhicitta Foundation seeks to break the cycle of poverty by giving women and girls the tools they need to financially support themselves and their families. An estimated 2,000 people benefit from the foundation’s initiatives in Nagpur each year. Continue reading →

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Posted in Education, Engaged Buddhism, Global poverty, Projects & programs, Women's livelihood

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Winning the Peace: Hunger and Instability

Posted on February 11, 2018 by | Comments Off on Winning the Peace: Hunger and Instability

By Charles W. Elliott

An increasingly hungry world is increasingly unstable. A new report issued by the World Food Program USA—Winning the Peace: Hunger and Instability—presents an unprecedented view into the dynamics of the relationship between hunger and social instability.[1]

Based on exhaustive interdisciplinary queries of a database of 90,000,000 peer-reviewed journal articles, the report explores the underpinnings and drivers of humanitarian crises involving food insecurity and conflict. Continue reading →

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Posted in Agriculture, Climate change, Education, Emergency relief, Food insecurity, Global Hunger

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BGR Solidarity Walk in Nagpur, India

Posted on October 27, 2017 by | Comments Off on BGR Solidarity Walk in Nagpur, India

By Ven. Ayya Yeshe

On Saturday, October 21, the Bodhicitta Foundation and members of our girls’ home walked in solidarity with our wonderful partners, Buddhist Global Relief, and all the wonderful people who contribute to our work of lifting women and children out of poverty. Continue reading →

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Posted in Engaged Buddhism, Global Hunger, Projects & programs, Walk to feed the hungry

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Resilient Livelihoods in Northern India

Posted on September 19, 2017 by | Comments Off on Resilient Livelihoods in Northern India

By Patricia Brick

Jay Devi, a farmer in Pritampur village in Uttar Pradesh, India, struggled for years to earn enough from the sale of her crops to pay for the fertilizers and pesticides she needed for her fields. Like many other women farmers in the region, she was entirely dependent upon purchased chemical fertilizers and pesticides for her crops of beans, corn, tomatoes, okra, and pumpkins. But the high cost of these products cut sharply into her earnings. She dreamed of saving enough money to purchase a water pump for her home so that she would no longer have to walk to a communal well for drinking water. But her profits were never enough; some seasons she could not even afford to buy the chemicals she needed, and as a result her crop yields suffered further.
Continue reading →

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Posted in Agriculture, Buddhist social ethics, Food security, Projects & programs

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Projects for Fiscal Year 2017–18—Part 3

Posted on June 19, 2017 by | Comments Off on Projects for Fiscal Year 2017–18—Part 3

By BGR Staff

10. Haiti: A School Feeding Program for Students in Jacmel

BGR’s partner in this project, the Art Creation Foundation for Children (ACFFC), is a US-based organization (founded 1999) whose mission is “to build a passionate community of future leaders, visionaries and dynamic thinkers who are empowered to better their lives and their world through the arts and education in Jacmel, Haiti.” The partnership with BGR will provide the students at ACFFC with at least one nutritious, filling meal per day on each of the six days of the week they attend school. Many children in Haiti will not attend daily education programs if meals are not a component of the program. For many of the students enrolled at ACFFC, the meals they receive there are their only opportunity to eat. Without the feeding program many of the children would spend their days either looking for food or working rather than attending school or being part of an art program. The feeding program is implemented by the staff of three kitchen personnel who prepare a minimum of 360 meals per week. BGR’s grant covers about a third of the total budget for the program. Annually renewable program

11. Haiti: Improved Production and Diversification of Crops in the Artibonite Valley

This project, with our partner Oxfam America, supports improved rice production and backyard vegetable gardening in the Artibonite Valley in Haiti. Agricultural activity is one of the main sources of income for this population, focused on rice produced in the Artibonite Valley. Attempts to increase the production of rice face structural constraints. In spite of this, Oxfam has worked for approximately five years to help smallholder producers to develop the potential for rice cultivation and maintain the livelihoods of poor families. Previous projects have encouraged the adoption of innovative farming practices such as the Sustainable Rice Intensification (SRI) techniques, irrigation, post-harvest improvements, and improving production practices in vegetable gardening.

The proposed project will leverage the grant from Buddhist Global Relief to expand upon existing activities in the small rural community of Délogner, in the third communal section of Petite-Rivière. This vulnerable population (pop. 5,139, 90% poverty rate, 50% food insecure) experienced a flood in January 2017, which nearly annihilated agricultural production, their primary means of subsistence. By reinforcing ongoing efforts in response to this recent shock, the project will directly reach 224 beneficiaries through a suite of activities including SRI training, establishment of an agricultural credit fund, rehabilitation of irrigation infrastructures (5 km of canals), agricultural diversification with backyard vegetable gardening, provision of specialized SRI equipment and plastic sheeting for drying of harvested rice, establishment of collective local nurseries, and local partner capacity building. Continue reading →

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Posted in Agriculture, Education, Ending global poverty, Engaged Buddhism, Food security, Projects & programs

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Prosperity Through Resilient Livelihood in Lakhimpur Kheri, India 

Posted on March 24, 2017 by | Comments Off on Prosperity Through Resilient Livelihood in Lakhimpur Kheri, India 

Patricia Brick

Manju Devi mulching in tomato cultivation

Manju Devi cultivates peas, tomatoes, eggplants, and chili peppers on 1/5 acre of land in her Musadei village in Lakhimpur Kheri, Uttar Pradesh, India. Through Oxfam India’s “Prosperity Through Resilient Livelihood” project, Devi and sixteen other women farmers in the Santoshi Mahila Kisan Samuh collective gather for a monthly “farmers’ field school” to learn sustainable practices for improving soil quality, agricultural productivity, and climate resilience.

Devi and other group members have begun selling organically grown tomatoes at the local market, and they have found that their income has already increased, to an annual income of INR 50,000 on average, exceeding the net per capita income for Uttar Pradesh. Additionally, by learning to use locally available materials to prepare organic insecticide, fungicide, and fertilizer, group members have been able to save money on purchased fertilizers and pesticides.
Continue reading →

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Projects for Fiscal Year 2016–17—Part 4 (of 6)

Posted on May 7, 2016 by | Comments Off on Projects for Fiscal Year 2016–17—Part 4 (of 6)

BGR Staff

13. India: A Girl’s Hostel & Women’s Community Center in Nagpur

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The Bodhicitta Foundation is a socially engaged charity established in 2001 by the Australian Buddhist nun, Ayya Yeshe, to help Dalits (scheduled classes) and slum dwellers in the state of Maharashtra. With funding from BGR, Bodhicitta has established a girls’ hostel for thirty girls aged 16–22, who are being trained as social and health workers or to qualify in a vocation. The hostel helps them escape poverty, trafficking, and the sex industry. The girls, chosen because of their dedication to their studies, come from the poorest regions in India: 10 from Bihar, 10 from rural Maharashtra, and 10 from urban Nagpur slums.

The girls are now in their third year of training, after which they will return to their villages with the skills to empower other young girls. In this way, the thirty girls will become agents of change and establish institutions that will benefit hundreds of girls and women in the future. Such a project is especially important in India because investing in girls’ education can alleviate poverty and the ignorance that oppresses poor girls and women.

The other portion of the BGR grant to Bodhicitta supports a women’s job training and community center, where women receive education, loans, and business training to empower them to start their own businesses and gain income that will directly increase the well-being of their children, families, and communities, lifting them out of poverty. The community center creates space for awareness-raising, health workshops, counseling, career guidance, and quality education that is currently lacking in the difficult environment of a large industrial slum. Year three of a three-year project. Continue reading →

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