National Fund Update
21 January 2021
4 Sultán 177 B.E.
Contents:
– National Fund update
– The Bahá’í World publication: New enhancements and essays
– Resilience in Honduras in the face of disaster
GC-35445
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To all believers in the United Kingdom
Dearly loved Friends,
The National Spiritual Assembly is deeply grateful to you all for having responded with such love and sacrifice to the call to contribute to the Fund, during this final year of the Five Year Plan.
Over the past 12 months, despite the impact the global health crisis has had on lives and livelihoods, the Bahá’ís of the United Kingdom were able to contribute the unprecedented figure of £1.1 million to the National Fund. (This has left a much smaller than anticipated deficit against the year’s expenditure of just under £362,000 – expenditure which included additional contributions of £380,000 to the International and Continental Fund in May 2020.) As you are aware, the goal for the Guardian’s Resting Place Endowment Fund set a decade ago was also met, as was the goal for the International Collaboration Fund set five years ago, both ahead of Riḍván 2021.
Elucidating upon the forthcoming One Year Plan, the Universal House of Justice has called upon us, in its 25 November 2020 message, to “consolidate the achievements made during the current Plan, while cultivating the conditions necessary for welcoming larger and larger numbers of souls into the embrace of a community recognized for its fortitude and outward-looking orientation.”
The next series of Plans will “significantly strengthen the Bahá’í community’s capacity for realising the society building powers of the Faith.” The steady progress being made throughout the United Kingdom, as programmes of growth intensify and a new pattern of life begins to emerge in a growing number of neighbourhoods, will no doubt continue to place increasing demands on the Fund.
As the National Assembly has shared the level of expenditure in the past, for the friends who are interested to know how the £2.6m expenditure is allocated, the chart below indicates how funds were expended during 2020.
The call from the National Assembly for the coming year is for the community – which has responded with such vigour during the past 12 months – to continue with the same level of determination and sacrifice to contribute to the National Fund, (including the fund to purchase suitable land for a national House of Worship). Through your consciousness of the Fund, our community can ensure that the financial resources required will be available.
Nothing short of a continuous flow of contributions to that [National] fund can, indeed, ensure the financial stability upon which so much of the progress of the institutions of the Faith must now inevitably depend.
Shoghi Effendi, To the National Spiritual Assembly of the United States and Canada, 29 July 1935
With loving Bahá’í greetings,
Darren Smith,
Treasurer
The Bahá’í World publication:
New enhancements and essays
The release of new essays on The Bahá’í World online publication is complemented by recent developments on the website. Read more here >
Resilience in Honduras in the face of disaster >
Bahá’í response to pandemic proves essential in face of hurricanes.