The Shambhala Financial Plan: Three Years and Beyond

 

Executive Summary

Now that Shambhala is free from operating debt at the international level, the Sakyong’s Council has adopted a plan to develop the central services provided to the mandala. This covers the period from 2008 to 2011 and beyond.

This plan has three phases:

  • Stabilize,
  • Strengthen 
  • Grow

Stabilize. This is Phase One, being put into effect in 2008. It will stabilize our existing services and begin to add critical new ones needed by the mandala now.

Strengthen. This is Phase Two, to take effect in 2009 and 2010. This will strengthen the central services, based on the foundation laid in Phase One and enable the further addition of new services for the mandala.

Grow.  This is Phase Three, to start in 2011. This will support the growth of the mandala and provide the services that will be needed as Shambhala reaches a new level of growth.

Rather than focus on one single aspect of our work that needs to be supported, this plan aims to move forward simultaneously to support the development of Shambhala in six areas. These have been identified as a result of the Shambhala Congresses, the work of the Mandala Council (on which all Shambhala Centres have a seat) and recommendations made by individuals from all parts of our community.

            The six key areas are:

 

1.  Offering a clear path

  • Developing new program outlines for the new curriculum that gathers the potency of our teachings into a clearer, unified path
  • Strengthening the Shambhala Office of Practice and Education to relieve the pressure on our small team
  • Putting the Shambhala Online on a firm footing so that we can continue to offer high quality dharma teachings in real-time on the internet.
  • Strengthening the alignment between the Acharyas and the Sakyong by restoring funding for their annual retreat
 

2. Building a supportive community

  • Establishing a Community Care Council to coordinate efforts in Accessibility and Disability, Diversity, Children and Families, Care of the aging, Delegs and Shambhala Care and Conduct
  • Start a “help line” to provide a welcoming, responsive threshold for people in need of information or guidance. This will be linked to improving our ability to share information on “best organizing practices”
  • Develop an online Shambhala Community News Magazine
  • Revamp the current web email system so that it can become a potent community-building tool, and
  • Add new features for the Centre Website Templates, including a Fundraising Suite and Centre Newsletter

 

3. Strengthening our worldwide mandala

  • Help establish an endowment fund for the North America People of Color Scholarship Fund. This will help people of color attend programs and training to enable them to become MI’s, teachers and leaders in their local centres.
  • Support the development of International Membership in the mandala. This needs planning, setting up, computer design, preparation of materials and support.

 

4. Supporting the Shambhala lineage

  • An important immediate step in securing the family lineage and honouring the Mother Lineage, is to provide a proper seat for the Sakyong Wangmo of the current Sakyong to be. We are now in  position to provide a modest salary for the Sakyong Wangmo once she is empowered in August 2008.

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5. Developing Shambhala leadership

  • Shambhala now has a structure of  mandala governanc. To encourage greater participation in governance, we are creating a  travel fund to support participation in governance, which will be a great step forward for the mandala as a whole
  • We have started holding Shambhala Governance Academies for centre directors These will be developed into a more regular events, with regional and specialized sessions taking place in different location
  • To stabilize the senior leadership of the mandala, we will appoint an  Executive Director in the Office of the President. We will also restructure the Shambhala Office of Finance and Development to create a senior management position with greater responsibilities

 

6. Managing our resources
 
  • We need to provide good staff support, training and proper working conditions. We are now able raise the salaries of the core employees of Shambhala to levels that are more comparable with market levels for non-profit organizations. This is a gesture of appreciation for the extraordinary efforts of our very small team in service to Shambhala.
  • A full time position of Development Coordinator has been created within the Shambhala Office of Finance and Development and filled to take this work forward and support the Dana Group, which pools fund-raising experience in the mandala
  • A part-time development assistant is being added to the Shambhala Office of  Finance and Development.. By freeing the accounting people to focus on finance work, this will help ensure that our financial reports are timely and that we can respond quickly to the many inquiries we receive from Shambhala Centres worldwide

Funding these initiatives

The funding for these initiatives will come from these sources.

  • The Gregg Campbell matching gift of $250,000 which was provided to the mandala through The Sakyong Foundation, and used to pay down the operating debt: the funds previously used for debt-repayment can now be deployed to provide services to the mandala
  • The matching donations raised in response to the Gregg Campbell challenge, largely recurring donations from Shambhalians all over the world
  • A generous bequest to Shambhala that not only helped complete our debt repayment, but made significant funds available for one-off expenses

The investment of funds in the initiatives listed above will amount to $196,000 in one-time expenditures (largely technology and short-term contract work) and $227,700 in recurring annual costs (staff and programmatic costs that will be sustained into the future). The recurring costs represents approximately 25% of the total budget of Shambhala at the international level ($1.3 million). A quarter of the recurring funding for these new initiatives ($72,000 a year) is redeployed from debt servicing.

Financial Sustainability

Following a planning meeting in November 2007 (attended by representatives of Shambhala Centres with major projects all over the mandala), the Sakyong’s Council adopted a set of Principles for Financial Sustainability. These apply to the centre of the mandala, the practice centres and all local Shambhala Centres. The initiatives listed above have been approved in accordance with those principles.

 

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Details of the initiatives in the key areas

In 2008, the Sakyong’s Council has allocated the following resources to each of these six areas:

1. Offering a clear path:  presenting the potency of our unique teachings

The Sakyong has asked us to gather the potency of our teachings into a unified, clear path of practice and study that fully expresses our unique heritage- from the beginning of the path up to the Scorpion Seal retreat. We are unique in having received the teachings and practices of the nine yana Buddhist path, the Shambhala cycle of terma, the maitri space awareness teachings, the Shambhala Art teachings, the teachings on Feminine and Masculine principles and so on, as well as the skilful means of the protector principle and the path of the Dorje Kasung. The aim is to present these so that we can taste their distinct qualities, but at the same time understand how they work together to cultivate the full potential of human beings and a flourishing human society.

Program Outlines

Now that the Sakyong has worked with a team of acharyas and the Office of Practice and Education to development a new, integrated curriculum for practitioners on the Shambhala Buddhist Path, the program outlines are being redrafted and we are planning support for a further series of pilot teachings.

Strengthening Practice and Education

We are adding a much-needed additional staff member to the Shambhala Office of Practice & Education, to relieve the pressure on our small team which serves practitioners throughout the mandala.

Shambhala Online project

We want to continue offering high quality dharma teachings in real-time using video conferencing over the internet..  This enables us to provide core curriculum teachings to small groups with few teachers and people in remote locations. The Sakyong can also provide more continuous guidance for students in real time using videoconferencing. The start-up costs have been partially provided by the Shambhala Trust. Now we want to put this on a firm basis for the future.

Strengthening the alignment between the Acharyas and the Sakyong

Last year there was a highly successful retreat of the Sakyong with many of the acharyas. This was held in order to deepen the connection between the acharyas and the Sakyong. It created opportunities for group practice, talks, meetings and time together as a group.  In 2007, we were forced to cut the funding for this from the budget. Now we have been able to restore this vital support and the Sakyong and acharyas. This year’s retreat was attended by almost all the acharyas and was a pivotal event in terms of the further development of the Shambhala Buddhist path.

 
 
2. Building a supportive community:  Providing the human services that support people on their path & in their lives

The “Third Jewel” of our Shambhala world is the community of practitioners. The health and well-being of that community is essential for the teachers and teachings to manifest. It provides the compassionate and wakeful container for all practitioners on the path. Developing a community imbued with the wisdom and compassion of the lineage, and which puts into daily practice the teachings themselves, is the indispensable stepping stone towards the larger vision of creating Enlightened Society in the world around us. The importance of attending to the needs of the community, and supporting the community in discovering and expressing its true nature, has emerged as one of the highest priority issues in the Shambhala Congresses.

Community Care Council

The Sakyong’s Council is now working on establishing a Community Care Council that will bring together efforts in a number of areas, including:

Accessibility and Disability

Delegs

Diversity

Children and Families   

Care of the aging

Shambhala Care and Conduct

This council will not, at the present time, require additional funding.

In addition, there has been a strong emphasis in recent discussions on making significant investment in our communications and technology capacity. The following initiatives support that:

Help Line

With the severe cuts in staffing at the centre of Shambhala in 2003, one crucial function that was lost was a team of people that could respond directly and personally to questions from all over the mandala. We  are now working on a “help line” to refer callers to the many specialist services in Shambhala, help people navigate the web to find information, put them in touch with folks working on “best organizing practices”, help them navigate communication channels that some callers may otherwise feel daunted by, and provide a welcoming, responsive threshold for people in need of information or guidance. This will be linked to improving our ability to share information on “best organizing practices” and  supporting Shambhala Centres and groups.

 

New website and communication services support

We have met one of the greatest demands from all parts of our community -- a new Shambhala.org website – and a Webmaster has been hired to keep the site current and responsive to our needs. We have also developed a template for Centres to use in customizing their own local websites, and close to 50 Centres are now taking advantage of this service. Those Centres who are using the website template system are enjoying the online registration capacity it offers for their local programs. The Shambhala.org website and Centre website templates are integrated with one another as well as with the Shambhala Database (SDB), where member information for over 6700 Shambhalians is currently stored. At this point, continued work is necessary in order to bring the remaining 15% of our membership on to the Shambhala Database (SDB), make it easier for everyone to access, and to make sure members’ practice and education histories are accurate. The vital work of building and implementing the new website, the Centre templates, and the SDB is nearing completion, but these systems will require continued maintenance and updating. Funding for this will need to come out of the central budget.

 Investing in Information Technologies

As one of our top priorities, the Congress included investing in new media and technology to disseminate information about Shambhala and our teachings. The new shambhala.org website has made a leap forward in this direction, but we need to keep the content fresh and find more ways to share news and teachings. We are now going to:  

(a) develop an online Shambhala Community News Magazine,  funded by the Shambhala Trust

(b) revamp the current web email system so that it can become a potent community-building tool, and

(c) add new features for the Centre Website Templates, including a Fundraising Suite and Centre Newsletter.

Thanks to generous support from the Communications and Technology Steering Committee, we are now able to employ an “IT supermanager” to further integrate and develop our new IT infrastructure. This will need to be completely sustained in the following years from the central budget.

 

 

3. Strengthening our worldwide mandala:  Supporting our global, multi-racial & multi-lingual community

One of the main issues that surfaced at the First Shambhala Congress – and has been a continuing theme of discussion and debate within our mandala – is diversity. What does the term “diversity” mean? How does it relate to the vast vision of Shambhala? What are our own inner biases that need to be addressed? What practical steps can be taken to welcome and train people in our community who come from different cultures, speak different languages and have special needs? All these, and many other questions, have been the focus of one of the most active of the current Working Groups in Shambhala: the Diversity Working Group.

 

North American People of Color Scholarship Fund

The Diversity Working Group is leading an effort to create an endowment fund which would provide scholarships to help people of color attend programs and training to enable them to become MI’s, teachers and leaders in their local centres.  The Trust has provided a grant and other fundraising is planned.  Shambhala would like to help fund this endowment.

 

International membership support

The Shambhala membership policy identified the need  to support  mandala membership functions, including policy application, oversight of the membership database and administration of the new category of International Membership. This form of membership in the mandala allows for participation by people not living in countries or areas with Shambhala Centres or groups – or to people who, for whatever reason, want to be individually associated directly with Shambhala. This needs planning, setting up, computer design, preparation of materials and support.

 

4. Supporting the Shambhala lineage:  Keeping pace with the growing momentum

The central energy of the Shambhala mandala is the lineage of Sakyongs. The current Sakyong, Jamgön Mipham Rinpoche, is entrusted with the responsibility of protecting and propagating the wisdom tradition he inherited from his predecessor, the Druk Sakyong, and carrying the lineage forward and transmitting it through the family lineage (dunjud) to his successor.  An important immediate step in securing the family lineage and honouring the Mother Lineage, is to provide a proper seat for the Sakyong Wangmo to be.

Seating the new Sakyong Wangmo

Shambhala has longed for a Sakyong Wangmo for our Sakyong. Now that she has been recognized, we have found ourselves financially unprepared. Specifically we need to fund her as a senior official of the mandala. We are now in  position to provide a modest salary for the Sakyong Wangmo once she is empowered in August 2008.

 

5. Developing Shambhala leadership:  Creating and maintaining sustainable governance

The Vidyadhara, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, spoke of our Shambhala Centres as “field training” for the creation of Enlightened Society. This is a distinctive feature of Shambhala Vision – that what might seem to be ordinary “administrative” tasks are, in fact, a profound ground of training in the bodhisattva path of service. In the same way, developing and supporting the emergence of Shambhala Governance – structures, principles and leadership practices – is very much part of the larger goal of social transformation.

 

Enable greater participation in mandala governance

Shambhala now has a structure of governance modelled on mandala principles. This was introduced in 2005 and continues to unfold. The third Shambhala Congress was held in Europe in May of 2007 – a landmark, both in terms of the development of the Congress and as a manifestation of our efforts to develop a more cohesive international community. The other bodies that make up the governance model include the Sakyong’s Council and Mandala Council (on which all Shambhala Centres have a seat). A distinctive feature of the Sakyong’s Council is that it has created a number of Working Groups (on accessibility, diversity, children and families, governance as path, and so on) that open up participation to people throughout the community. All these groups face the hurdle of not being able, in many cases, to have face-to-face meetings. For example, there is a severe limitation on scholarships to enable people to attend the Shambhala Congresses. We are now able to create a  travel fund to support participation in governance at each of these levels, it would be a great step forward for the mandala as a whole.

 

Shambhala Governance Academy

Regular training in Shambhala governance is essential for the good health of our community, the proper management of our centres and groups and for the development of the Shambhala leadership potential that is integral to the path laid out by our lineage. There has been much done in this area: many people have offered teachings and trainings. Authentic leadership programs are being offered, both for people within our community and beyond it. However, there is a clearly identified need for the cultivation of Shambhala Governance that is directly linked to the specific needs of existing and emerging leaders in our community. A recent start was the Shambhala Governance Academy held for centre directors (following a pilot program in Boulder) in 2006. This will be developed into a more regular event, with regional and specialized sessions taking place throughout the year in different locations in the mandala. .  In 2008 the Academy will be held in the fall at Karmê Chöling, immediately following a meeting of the Mandala Council

Stabilizing the situation of the senior leadership of the mandala

Currently, two leading figures in the mandala carry major responsibilities in their capacity as volunteers. They are willing to serve the mandala in this way, but this is a highly unstable and untenable situation. It is most likely that if one or either of them were to need to step back from their responsibilities, the mandala would face emergency needs for funding since their responsibilities would normally be carried by people with family and other obligations requiring that they be paid for their work.

Both President Reoch and Chungdzu Kyi Kyap Connie Brock are unpaid volunteers that devote long hours to Shambhala. The precariousness of this situation is not only financial. The President carries a staggering workload, more than half of which consists of tasks – such as detailed staff management, wide-ranging administrative and problem-solving work at Nyen levels of the mandala --  that an Executive Director ought to handle. This would not only ease the burden on our President, but also free him for more strategic work which the Sakyong and others have asked him to undertake.

These matters will be addressed in separate ways.

Appointment of an Executive Director in the Office of the President.

A job-description of this position will be developed and discussed by the Sakyong’s Council before being finalized. Recruitment can then be opened within the mandala as soon as is feasible.       

           

Restructure the Shambhala Office of Finance and Development.

There has been some discussion thus far about ways in which this office could be restructured to meet a range of needs. The senior accountant position has been upgraded to comptroller. We are also moving towards replacing the current senior management position with a position with more senior and broader responsibilities.

 

6. Responsible management of resources:  The human realities and the financial factor

Our aspiration to transmit our precious teachings to coming generations has to be matched by a very basic approach to managing our resources. We have been through many years of spontaneous growth; now growth needs to be balanced with planning and establishing a basis of financial stability. We have now succeeded in freeing the centre of the mandala from operating debt. We have also adopted a set of Principles on Financial Sustainability. There are other measures that are needed to further stabilize the centre of the mandala.

Staff support, training and proper conditions

We have not been able to provide, in most cases, sufficient staff support, training or proper working conditions. Providing proper support and working conditions are important in order to encourage longer periods of service (thus providing much needed continuity in experience and expertise), to attract more highly skilled workers, to provide conditions suitable for family life and to demonstrate that the organization manifests its principles in the way it treats its own workers.

A number of measures will now be taken, the first of which is to raise the salaries of the core employees of Shambhala to levels that are somewhat more comparable with market levels for non-profit organizations. This would also include raising the stipend paid to the continuity kusung who travel with the Sakyong and Khandro Tseyang’s travelling secretary. For most of the last few years we have not been able to make any gesture of this sort at all. The decision to make this a high priority reflects the deep appreciation of the Sakyong's Council for the extraordinary efforts of our very small team in service to the radiant vision of Shambhala.

Sustaining Development Work

The Dana Group was formed after the recent Shambhala Congress to pool the experience and advice of people with professional fund-raising and related experience. It aims to stimulate creative thinking about how best to strengthen the funding of the mandala as a whole.  The group has identified a number of ongoing efforts needed to develop the fundraising capacity of the mandala as a whole.  A full time position of Development Coordinator has been created within the Shambhala Office of Finance and Development and filled to take this work forward and support the Dana Group.

Strengthening our financial services

The Shambhala Office of Finance and Development has struggled heroically with the volume of financial and development work that is needed to service this vital (but often unseen) aspect of the health of our mandala. A part-time development assistant is being added to restore a position held open because of extreme financial constraints.  This position will support  development activities, freeing the accounting people to focus on finance work. This will help ensure that our financial reports are timely and that we can respond quickly to the many inquiries we receive from Shambhala Centres worldwide.

 

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