Women in India create new Trust for women's projects

The Arya Tara Mahila Trust is a new Trust helping to support and fund projects for women in India. Its main function is to allow women working in FWBO/TBMSG projects in India to receive funding from outside India without needing to rely on our existing organisations, all of which are mainly run by men. This brings much greater freedom, and of course responsibility - which they welcome.

It is the first organisation in our movement set up by women for Indian women. They have lauched a newsletter, Varada, and produced its first issue. Click here to read it. Among other things it contains reports on their program to combat domestic violence in India (outlawed for the first time only in 2006) and the Karuna Computer Education Centre, their new computer training institute.

They also have ambitious fundraising plans, and say -

"In the next four to five years, we want to develop a retreat centre for Indian women run by a community of Indian women. At the present time, there are three main retreat centres in TBMSG, all run by teams of men.

"We want our retreat centre to be somewhere in central India, accessible to women both from the north and south. This is increasingly important as the Dhamma spreads and grows more and more in other Indian states. We intend in the next year to focus on fundraising in other countries as well as in India.

"For the next year, we aim to raise a minimum of US $150,000".

We would be very happy to hear from you, and you can contact us via email or looking at our website www.indiansisters.org.