Tiratanaloka is on the market!
On Fri, 28 July, 2023 - 13:58
Tiratanaloka retreat centre came into being with the purchase of Aberclydach House at the end of 1994. This project was brought to fruition by five senior dharmacharinis - Samata, Dhammadinna, Anjali, Anoma and Sanghadevi - who in 1992 got together to develop a sustainable process for women who had asked for ordination.
Tiratanaloka as an ordination training centre has been a huge success, to the point where we have now outgrown our space. We are currently very limited in regard to the number of women who can come here on retreat. We are also growing our team to support the mission; there are currently 1278 women in the ordination process outside of India with an average of around 114 women asking for ordination over the last 5 years.
As many of you know, we launched our vision, Tiratanaloka Unlimited, in August last year at the Order Convention because we want to remove the limits on the numbers of women who can train for ordination with us. Having a larger property would reduce waiting lists, allow women training for ordination to come on as many retreats as they’d like each year. It would also enable us to have the bigger team that we need to support our vision.
Subhadramati is leading the fundraising for this vision. We are over a third of the way to our target, having raised over half a million pounds in under a year. We are aiming to raise 1.5 million in total. Our property kula is also very active in looking for the new Tiratanaloka and Ratnadharini, with her experience and support, is instrumental to this.
The reason for my writing now on behalf of the team is to let you know that we have put Aberclydach House on the market, a very significant next step in this project. This will enable us to move more quickly if we find a new property.
As well as sharing this news with you, we are also asking for your help in finding the new Tiratanaloka. Aberclydach House itself was found through word of mouth, so if you happen to know of a property that might be suitable for our project please do contact us: details below.
What we need:
- A retreat centre which comes with some land (a minimum of 5 acres), in an accessible location.
- A property that can hold a minimum of 60 retreatants, plus a permanent community team of 13.
- We want to be able to run retreats fairly soon after moving, so we are not considering any properties which require major building work (although some development in the future will naturally occur).
- We are particularly interested in buildings formerly used for leisure and which can be quickly adapted for our needs (such as former youth hostels).
- We are looking at properties costing between £2-£3m; we are aware that properties are going down in price and we may be able to negotiate.
If you would like to find out more, help us in our search, or you know somewhere that may be suitable, please email the same address tiratanalokaproperties [at] gmail.com, or feel free to contact Prajnagita directly: prajnagita [at] gmail.com.
For information about the project go to https://tiratanaloka.org.uk/unlimited
And do please follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tiratanaloka, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Tiratanaloka, and sign up to our mailing list!
With love and thanks,
Karunadhi
Chair of Tiratanaloka
