March 25, 2011
Dear Supporters, Shareholders and Friends:
I am writing to inform you of our current situation which I ask that you hold in your prayers.
The Life Experience School for special needs children and young adults, founded in 1972 as my alternative service as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, is near bankruptcy. As you know, The Life Experience School created The Peace Abbey following Mother Teresa's visit in 1988, and has since that time carried the financial responsibility of the Abbey operation.
With further cuts in the state human service budget and a steady decline in contributions due to the economic crisis and a persistent, world-wide recession, the following notice is sadly given: Middlesex Savings Bank, which holds The Life Experience School mortgage ($63,000) and the line-of-credit ($303,000) has notified us through their attorney that we are in default and have been given 30 days to resolve our financial impasse. We are moving forward with a forbearance agreement with the bank that will put a hold on monthly payments through the end of May.
Over the past few years, our financial situation has been, at best, fragile. Shareholders, through the interest-free loan program and the donation program, contributed over $377,000 and are responsible, along with countless other contributors, for helping to lift the financial burden that The Life Experience School has carried. Over the past twenty-three years, monies that could have been used to establish an endowment for The Life Experience School have instead been devoted to creating and maintaining The Peace Abbey. As a result, The Life Experience School is at risk of closing.
At this point in time, we have but few viable options as we move forward. One solution would be to sell one of the two Abbey buildings, owned by The Life Experience School, in order to prevent the School's bankruptcy. This is what we have agreed to do in order to address the default status of our loans with the Bank. Another option is to raise enough money to pay off the mortgage, and line-of-credit which is a much more desirable option, though highly unlikely to happen in time to stave off an impending foreclosure. Yet, if we were successful, we would hold the mortgage free and clear on the School and Abbey properties and no longer be beholden to a bank for our existence.
Thinking into the future -- a new updated Abbey website is being created by a wonderful volunteer, and we are planning to launch a major social media funding campaign using Facebook and Twitter. Other volunteer fundraising professionals are working with me to develop strategies to ensure a reliable stream of revenue going forward. But these measures will take time. And time, like money, is in short supply. Should the Abbey property end up being sold, shareholders are to be assured that all loans as well as monies donated for the furnace fund will be repaid in full.
I am writing, not to ask for another donation, but for your assistance in reaching out to those who are capable of making major contributions. Countless smaller donations to the School and Abbey, like those that have sustained us for two decades, quite frankly, will not solve our financial crisis in time. So having done your part already, I am now asking that you pass the word to those who sit on boards of institutions, foundations and trusts and humbly call upon them to do their part to save The Peace Abbey and The Life Experience School. If the Abbey is to exist into the future without The Life Experience School's financial support and ownership, it will take a foundation, family trust or wealthy individual to save these institutions with a tax-deductive gift of $366,000 to retire the two outstanding debts of $63,000 and $303,000.
Please keep The Peace Abbey in your prayers and feel free to contact me if you have any questions, ideas or suggestions. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Lewis
Lewis Randa
Founder / Director
The Life Experience School (1972)
The Peace Abbey (1988)
lewis@peaceabbey.org
P.S. It has been suggested, in addition to reaching out to everyone who can help, that Peace Abbey supporters contact Ellen DeGeneres through her webpage (THE ELLEN SHOW) as it offers the viewing public an opportunity to suggest ways in which she might help a worthy organization. As you know, Ellen is extremely generous, is committed to peace and social justice and just happens to be an animal lover; vegan even! Her webpage offers an opportunity to tell her about someone or a place in 1500 characters or less: THE ELLEN SHOW. Feel free to say whatever you'd like about the Life Experience School and Peace Abbey as it may resonate with her and help might be around the corner. It's worth a try.
Keep the Abbey in your prayers.
Lewis,
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing Robert's thoughts. My take is different. Unlike the finger pointing at the moon, the nexus of truths so powerfully embodied by all that the Peace Abbey represents are not something physical we could otherwise point to. The collective representation of so many aspects of peacemaking and manifest ahimsa are nowhere else visible in a single synergistic wholeness. The genius of the Peace Abbey is that it is not only the finger, but it IS the moon. It IS something we can see, touch, experience. The connections are all there, each facet reflecting and magnifying all the others. The whole is so much greater than any of its individually profound parts. The Peace Abbey is the fullest possible moon we would not otherwise see, in its most overwhelming fullness.
Dan Dick
Dear Robert,
ReplyDeleteThank you for shining much needed light on a dim situation. You've brightened my day, my heart and perspective!
With deep gratitude,
Carol Bedrosian
Very Inspiring!!
ReplyDeleteNEC Trophy
Dear friends and colleagues,
ReplyDeletePlease read the letter in the email below from Lewis Randa, founder of the Peace Abbey and the Life Experience School.
The Peace Abbey serves a function that no other institution in MA can fill, and that few others in the US fill. If you have never been there, I urge you to visit it before it is forced to close due to financial constraints. You will truly miss out on a profound experience of peace, non-violence, compassion and integrity if you don't visit the Peace Abbey.
Maya Angelou, Mother Teresa, Muhammed Ali, and so many others, both famous and unknown, who desire a more just and peaceful world, have visited the Peace Abbey and been renewed by its spirit.
The Life Experience School has served numerous adolescents with a variety of special needs, providing them with a loving, nurturing, accepting environment. Students leave the Life Experience School, not only with skills, but also with a sense of self-esteem and personal efficacy, despite their many challenges.
If you know of anyone who has the means and may have the desire to help the Peace Abbey to avoid foreclosure, please contact them.
They can contact Lewis Randa directly, or me, if they prefer.
I can not emphasize enough what a loss it will be if the Peace Abbey and/or the school are forced to close their doors.
Please pass this on to everyone you know.
Thank you,
Jan Krause Greene
I got the email about the Abbey’s financial situation on Friday evening, March 25. As it happened, I was at the Abbey early the next morning for a meeting. So, I stood on the porch and looked out over the grounds: Remembrance Hill and the Cabin, Emily, Gandhi, the Conference Center, etc. I had seen Gabriel in the field. As I took it in, I realized that this manifestation of our common dream, true peace on earth, symbolized for many of us what might be. Because we’re human—tactile, visual, auditory—we often get attached to the signs of things. But as Gotama Buddha said: “The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.”
ReplyDeleteAll the marvelous things that comprise the Peace Abbey are worth working to save, maintain and enhance. But they are not the real work of the Abbey. It is the heart work of the Abbey that in the end is all that counts. The refuge, the inspiration, the vision, the healing, the wholeness that the Peace Abbey has provided for countless thousands is the real work. That work is aided by all the signs about the Abbey’s environs, but it is not the work itself. And the work goes on regardless of any shift in the Abbey’s present physical reality.
Born from the love and work of the Life Experience School, the Abbey’s message—its song— is that all living beings are connected, and all spiritual insight is connected as well. We are part of one another. As such, we need to stand up for truth and justice and compassion; that is the only road to peace. No mortgage default can take away that understanding. We need to strive to hold on to this visible sign of our understanding, but we do not need to be afraid. No church is made of walls, nor is the Peace Abbey. This place which has been and is of such great comfort to me—where I feel at home—resides in my heart and always will.
Robert Dove McClellan
Over the years, I think that our contact with the Peace Abbey goes far back before either the Peace Abbey or Agape existed; at least this is what I am thinking as I write. We met Dot Walsh during the early 80’s as members of a peace group: Ailanthus: A Nonviolent Witness for Peace, when some of us spent time in jail and then did some prison ministry through which we met Dot.
ReplyDeleteDuring the early days of Agape and the Abbey, Dan Berrigan was awarded the Abbey Peace Prize and was quite struck by the combination of peace work and serving the children at the school and glowed about what he experienced through his time at the Abbey. And so it goes, with so many other riches, witnesses and truth-telling, pain-holding, solidarity-molding.
We at Agape have always felt a deep bond of connection to the work and witness at the Peace Abbey, and the fact that the ashes of many of our dear friends lie buried there—Tom Lewis, Dave Dellinger, Wally Nelson, makes the grounds a sacred place for us in ways that go beyond the realm of the linear ways of thinking about peace.
We are grateful to Dot and Lewis for the effort in organizing the witness on the day of Shock and Awe, that brought the Peacechain 18 together for a court witness that was a test of the Defense of Necessity and brought many peace communities together—House of Peace, Agape, Emma House, Pax Christi, to be arrested in a nonviolent position of prayer at a Natick military facility.
We are aware of the crisis before you and hope that the solution will move in the direction of the reality of these times, the question of survival and legacy, and that the good work of our sisters and brothers at the Peace Abbey will continue, even if in a different voice and version from the present.
We want to add our voices, nevertheless, to the chorus of praise for the persistence, commitment and spirit of inclusiveness that has been the Peace Abbey trademark all of these years.
In prayerful anticipation of the descent of creative response and purposeful direction,
Suzanne Belote Shanley Agape Community
It was with such sadness that I read your email about the financial threat that the Peace Abbey faces.
ReplyDeleteA part of me was mindful of the fact that things have been this dire before, in the history of the Abbey, and that even last-minute miracles have helped to pull it back from the coals in the past. That gives me some sense of reasonable hope that this will once again be the case.
Another part of me is so angry that it should get to this point, when unimaginable trillions of dollars are so freely flowing to fund things that are the antithesis of all that the Abbey stands for. My rage is because my tax dollars are a part of those trillions; I would far rather that they went to help fund the imperative work that is done by all connected to the Peace Abbey.
Then there is the part of me that stops, as soon as I step through the door of the Abbey, and breathes in the essence of it all; the part of me that knows that my heart has come home, that my spirit can once again receive the much-needed boost in energy that I always experience there. That part of me is sad, in pain, and afraid of what may be lost---not just to me, but to all who know and love the Abbey, and to the countless others from all over the world who have yet to find it for themselves at the Peace Abbey.
I remember once talking with you about the constant battle of funds, and my fervent wish that I might win the lottery. The Peace Abbey has always been my major motivation for the few times I buy a ticket. It has given me such delight to imagine sending an anonymous check for millions of dollars to you, and to imagine the incredible difference this would make for so many in the world. And I remember you saying to me that that would be a wonderful thing, but that "people like us don't win the lottery."
I pray---with everything in me, I pray---that someone who is able, whether through winning the lottery, or having been born wealthy, or someone who wants to acquire some Amazing Grace to balance a life of ill-gotten money, will come through. A hundred thousand dollars is so little to so many people in the world---in Massachusetts, alone. I pray that this will happen soon.
Thank you, so much, for the gift of the Abbey to our world. It is the place that I always conjure in my mind when I meditate, seeing myself sitting there, surrounded by so much that I hold dear. It has, for so long now, been the one thing in my world that gives me hope that Light and Love can and do thrive in this poor world of ours.
With love and gratitude---and much hope,
Lin Hood-Glidden
I write this note in the hope that you are well and with eternal fondness for the Peace Abby and concern about its well-being!
ReplyDeleteI would like to make a financial contribution to help in this way...
Also, Ben Tousley forwarded me the note from Shareholder Robert Dove McClennan...it made me remember all of the wonderful times I've had at the Peace Abby, singing, listening, learning, walking away fuller in my heart, always.
Ben and I have, in recent times, renewed our musical collaboration and would love to come and sing again sometime...we are working on a new CD and we would love to share the demo with you...
Take good care,
Sue Kranz