Photograph courtesy of BGR partner the Dhammajarinee Witthaya School.
By Patricia Price
In the fall of 2008, BGR’s board awarded our first round of grants to our partners … all three of them! This was a defining event for us as we accepted Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi’s invitation to create a grant-making organization with the mission of reducing hunger among the world’s poor. Today, thanks to you and other BGR friends, our grant funded projects now include roughly 60 annual and multiyear project partners, as well as several emergency grants to international NGOs responding to major disasters.
This is only possible because of you and the other BGR supporters who have joined us in our mission not only to provide direct food aid to families, schools, and communities, but also to provide basic education for children, support vocational funding for women, and teach food cultivation skills to individuals and communities, offering tools, seeds, and best practices appropriate for their climate.
We intend to keep doing this work and welcome your continued support. This past year, in addition to the small gifts upon which our work depends, BGR received a few generous larger gifts to support global emergencies. We were humbled to also receive estate gifts from longtime supporters who had named BGR as a beneficiary in their estate plans.
We exist only because of supporters like you. Your help allows thousands of girls to be educated equally with boys, provides school meals that incentivize parents to send their girls to school, and helps provide poor mothers with materials and instruction to learn marketable skills with which they can earn income for their families. With every year, we expand the number of people our programs serve.
In this season of giving, we welcome your gifts of any size. We also ask you to consider naming Buddhist Global Relief for a future gift through your estate plan. For more information about estate giving, please contact me directly at pricep@buddhistglobalrelief.org. Together we can reduce hunger for people around the world.
Patricia Price is the deputy director of BGR.
