Sanghadevi away in Spain for a few weeks

Hi everyone. I just wanted to let you know I am away in Spain at Akasavanan until October 25th facilitating a one month retreat for women Order members in the Triratna community. Taravandana is going to help me a bit with fundraising efforts whilst I am away; mailing some Order members in UK and seeing if we can enlist their help by way of pledging money towards the £60,000 target. I am sorry to say my efforts in this respect since I returned to Cambridge on Sept 2nd from Norfolk have only attracted one £50 pledge to date...but all is not lost...I have felt quite inspired as I wrote letters to people...I intend to continue writing letters and making follow up phone calls when I pick up the fr work again once I am back from Spain.

Fundraising for Sudarshanaloka Launched in August

A few weeks back I headed off to Wymondham College, Norfolk UK where over the course of ten days hundreds of members of the Triratna Buddhist Order came from across the world in order to meditate and share time together in various ways. There was a daily programme of shared activities as well as many many optional workshops offered by various people in otherwise 'free' afternoon slots after lunch. I took the opportunity to give a talk and slide-show a couple of times over the ten days; speaking of my connection with Sudarshanaloka, the people who live there, what the place is like and so on, building up to explaining why I wanted to raise money for the project and requesting people to consider pledging to raise/give a certain amount by Nov 2012. I also set up a stall in the so called 'shopping mall' which was our biggest yet with about 30 stall holders all selling things and/or fundraising for various projects worldwide. I reckon £1000's was spent or pledged in that mall over the course of those ten days. It is a great way for people to share what they care about and also display their talents as many of the stalls displayed items made by the stall holder; pottery; jewellery; eco-urns; paintings; hand-made cards and so on. My stall was focused on giving people a glimpse of Sudarshanaloka so I had a back drop of images and captions about the place and people as well as blurb about my fundraising brief. On the table in front I had an ongoing slideshow running on my laptop as well as handouts, some cards for sale, four scale models of the stupa [thanks to Dharmamudra] and a pledge sheet for folk to sign. I had intended to ask a friend to take a photo of the stall so i could show you here but I am afraid I completely forgot so my words will have to suffice. Sorry about that.

I got a pretty poor turn out for the talks I gave [only 17 people in total and two of them were my 'supporters']. Most of those 17 folk had already been to Sudarshanaloka and live in either NZ or Australia. I appreciated their interest in what I was doing and encouraged them to contribute to the fundraising the Trust itself is doing [see link on Sudarshanaloka website]. I am targeting folk outside of Australia and NZ for my fundraising target of £60,000 [see my Just Giving link on this blog].

Despite the poor turn out I did get some sign up for pledges on the stall; I am pleased to report that to date £2,250 has been pledged. I also covered the costs of the cards I'd made and have made a small profit on them so far. I hope to sell the stock I have in hand at some future Order weekend here in UK.