Lina Nasir, 9, is a child with disability in Bul’ad IDP camp near the town of Hargele in the Somali region of Ethiopia. Lina and her family are displaced by drought. She is still too young to understand the climate crisis that is unfolding around her, yet she is living its worst consequences. ©UNICEF Ethiopia/2023/Mulugeta Ayene
By Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi
When I first encountered Buddhism back in 1965, I was deeply impressed by the Buddha’s emphasis on compassion, extolled as a pillar of his teaching and the motivation for his decision to teach. This emphasis resonated with the aspirations cherished by many young people of my generation—aspirations for global peace, social justice, and human rights. As I embraced the Dhamma, I learned to look to compassion as a guide to personal conduct and adopt its conscious cultivation as part of my daily meditation practice. With the passage of time, however, as I felt more keenly the unbearable suffering that crushes millions of lives throughout the world, I came to see the need for compassion to take on a more active role. It seemed to me that compassion had to be coupled with a commitment to social justice, that part of our responsibility as followers of the Dhamma was to strive to lift people up from the morass of poverty, hunger, violence, and oppression that forms their everyday reality. When I met others who shared this conviction, our discussions led to the birth of Buddhist Global Relief, whose inspiring ideal is “conscientious compassion,” compassion actively dedicated to collective transformation.
Since Buddhist Global Relief started as a small organization with limited funds—very limited funds—our operation was necessarily small. We formed partnerships with other relief organizations working on the ground, formulating projects that would offer pathways out from poverty, hunger, and malnutrition to poor communities around the world, even in the U.S. itself. Over the years, the number of these small and middle-sized projects gradually expanded until we now sponsor close to 60 such projects on four continents.
As the donations supporting our work increased in number and size, we decided to take advantage of our larger reserves to raise our mission to a higher level. One crucial step toward this enlarged mission occurred in our fiscal year 2023, when a generous foundation offered us a grant of $500,000 to provide emergency assistance to countries in southern Asia facing severe hunger, partly caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Joining hands with major relief and development organizations, we provided critically needed food support to people in Sri Lanka and Myanmar. We also offered a grant of $100,000 to the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) to provide food assistance to Rohingya refugees who had fled ethnic cleansing in their native Myanmar and had settled in Bangladesh.
Our next round of large grants to major relief organizations occurred a bit later in our fiscal year 2023. It came as a response to the terrible hunger crisis that had descended on the Horn of Africa, caused by drought, conflict, and invasions by locusts. We provided emergency grants totaling $300,000 to send crucial food relief to the people of Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Sudan. The organizations we partnered with were the World Food Programme, UNICEF, Oxfam, CARE, and Action Against Hunger. These charities have become trusted friends of BGR, and on several occasions we’ve met their leaders, both in person and online.
On 7 October 2021, Nasri Garane helps her 2-year-old son, Liban Ali, to have a drink of water while fetching water for her household at the water kiosk in Daley Village, Garissa County, Kenya. UNICEF is supporting the Garissa County government and communities to prepare for and respond to drought. ©UNICEF/UN0641788/Orina
Early in our fiscal year 2024, we again made a large-scale donation of $300,000, this time to the World Food Programme to help with emergency food relief in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and Gaza, and to three large organizations providing emergency relief in Ukraine: Save the Children, Action Against Hunger, and the World Central Kitchen.
This year, at the end of August, our Board voted to distribute still another $300,000 in emergency relief to tackle some of the most daunting hunger crises in the world today. The largest allocation, $100,000, has gone to the WFP to provide hunger relief to Sudan, where a brutal conflict between two rival factions has intensified hunger to an unprecedented degree. Over 25 million people in Sudan are now experiencing acute hunger, 8.5 million at emergency and catastrophic levels. Our grant to the WFP, the only organization able to operate in this war-torn country, will help them reach the people most in need.
Another large BGR grant, of $50,000, has gone to offer food assistance to the people of Gaza. For almost a full year, the Gazan population has faced relentless Israeli airstrikes and a blockade of critical aid, including food, which threatens the population with acute hunger and even mass starvation. We divided the Gazan grant between UNRWA—the UN’s Palestinian relief agency—and the World Central Kitchen. UNRWA provides emergency assistance to over a million Palestinian refugees, or about 75 per cent of all Palestinian refugees in Gaza, who lack the financial means to cover their basic food needs. After a tragic setback this past April, the World Central Kitchen has resumed operations in Gaza, where it has been distributing millions of meals to thousands of families on the brink of famine.
A third large BGR grant, of $50,000, has gone to the WFP to provide hunger relief in Afghanistan, which is experiencing drastic food shortages driven by 40 years of conflict, entrenched poverty, natural disasters, and a repressive theocratic regime. An estimated 12.4 million people (28 percent of the total population) are acutely food insecure, and 2.36 million face emergency levels of hunger. The WFP is the only effective relief organization allowed to work in this battered country. Last year, during a critical food shortage, BGR supported WFP operations in Afghanistan, and this new grant will allow the agency to sustain its work in the country.
In addition to these grants, BGR has also contributed $50,000 each to support hunger-relief efforts in Sri Lanka and the Horn of Africa. In Sri Lanka, a partnership with Sarvodaya will promote the creation of community kitchens to provide hot meals to preschool children and train vulnerable women in innovative mushroom cultivation for their livelihood. The focus in the Horn of Africa is on South Sudan, an extremely poor country now struggling to feed a large influx of refugees pouring in from Sudan. Our primary partners here are UNICEF and Action Against Hunger.
When we allocate such large grants to major humanitarian organizations, potential BGR donors may ask why they should continue to support BGR rather than donate directly to these other organizations. While we encourage those inspired by the work these large agencies undertake to donate directly to them, we can offer several reasons why our donors should continue to support BGR.
For one thing, BGR’s primary mission is to seek out and partner with smaller grassroots organizations that are deeply intertwined with the people in the countries they serve. Our overriding aim is not to address crisis levels of hunger, but to promote local capacity so that the beneficiaries of our projects will become self-sufficient, able to provide for themselves. While we expect our expenditure on large-scale emergency assistance to be in the range of $300,000 a year, our total expenditure on projects in fiscal year 2023 was over $2,000,000. Large-scale relief grants are thus only a fraction of our budget.
Another reason to continue supporting BGR has to do with “collective presence,” with the strength that comes from participating in a shared endeavor. In the past, when disasters and catastrophes would strike around the world, and various faith-based agencies would reach out to help, people would sometimes ask me: “Where are the Buddhists?” Too often, when faced with this question, I would be left speechless. Now I can point to the work of BGR and say: “That’s what the Buddhists are doing.” By supporting the work of BGR, we can experience the joy of knowing that we’re part of something bigger than ourselves, that we’re collaborating with others in a task of enormous value. We can rejoice in the realization that with our gifts we are literally saving lives, and that we’re doing so under the banner of the Buddha’s great compassion. We’re part of an organization that is putting into practice the spiritual perfections (pāramitās) of generosity and loving-kindness, and we ourselves are demonstrating compassion in action.
Looking toward the future, we intend to sustain this dual-track mission. We can both walk and chew gum at the same time. We’ll continue to sponsor primarily small and medium-sized projects, but we’ll also be using the extra funds we receive to help large reputable relief organizations respond to catastrophic levels of hunger at a scale that exceeds our own capacity.
As we review the trajectory of BGR’s evolution, we are deeply gratified to see that BGR has become a respected and effective vehicle of conscientious compassion, extending a helping hand to people everywhere being swept up by the fierce currents of poverty and hunger. It’s a stain on the soul of humankind that our governments invest trillions of dollars in bloated military budgets while too many people suffer from poverty and hunger. However, it is also to our credit that individuals of vision arise who point out a different path, a path built on an affirmation of our common humanity. Through the work of BGR, we’re attempting to walk that path, and we rejoice that so many of you are walking along with us.
Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi is the founder and chair of Buddhist Global Relief.
