Founded in Fall 2011, the Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation is the fundraising arm and a communications hub of our beloved Plum Village community. We work to continue Thay’s mindful teachings and practices by providing support for our practice centers and monastic teachers, for community building and Dharma outreach initiatives, and for relief for victims of natural disaster and poverty in Vietnam and beyond. Through our community’s generous giving, the Foundation helps orient our world toward our collective goals of practicing mindfulness, fostering peace and transforming suffering in all people, animals, plants, and our planet.

Maintaining Our Refuge: Support for Our Practice Centers

The Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation ensures our monasteries continue to be stable and open to people seeking refuge, peace, and training in the art of mindful living. Through the Foundation, your generous giving sustains operational expenses at our monastic practice centers, such as food and regular maintenance. Your funds also support the ability for our monastic brothers and sisters to renovate and build new structures when needed, such as is currently the case for Blue Cliff Monastery in New York and Deer Park Monastery in California, where the buildings are dilapidated and living and communal spaces are cramped. We are very grateful to everyone who has already contributed to help meet the needs of our beloved practice centers.

“The donations received through the Foundation have made a significant impact in the care available to the monastics and also on our quality of life.”

Brother Phap Hai

Monastic Health Care

Unfortunately, in the United States, many monastics do not qualify for health insurance coverage. Prior to the creation of our Monastic Health Care Fund, monastics often pushed aside their medical needs, feeling that they did not want to take money away from the Sangha. Your loving gifts provided eighty-three monastics with needed care.

These monastics have been able to attend regular medical, dental, and eye exams, and to receive essential medicines. Your funds have made a particularly large impact on the quality of life of monastics with chronic or life-threatening illnesses, who have been able to make hospital and emergency room visits and receive important blood tests, transfusions, and medical imaging. Our monastic friends are invaluable teachers in our practice and models of compassionate living. Thank you for taking care of them.

Dharma Sharing Program: Offering Healing Across Communities

Thay has always taught us that our practice must be engaged. In keeping with this teaching, the Foundation helps support programs that water seeds of healing and community building around the world. These programs include:

• Bringing mindfulness to underserved areas, through community initiatives, teaching tours, and retreat scholarships
• Bringing mindfulness to schools
• Supporting organized Days of Mindfulness and retreats
• Providing Sangha startup kits to new communities of practice
• Sustaining our community infrastructure through support for shared global technology platforms that help bring Thay’s teachings to audiences online

If you have a community initiative, you can apply for Dharma Sharing funding at tnhf.org/grants. When we practice not just as individuals but also share the practice with others, the energy of mindfulness, transformation, and peace are more powerful in benefiting our society.

Love and Understanding: Support for Sister Chan Khong’s Humanitarian Work

In 1960, Sister Chan Khong, then a twenty-two-year old university student in Vietnam, wrote to Thich Nhat Hanh about her vision of engaging Buddhist practitioners in efforts of community empowerment and humanitarian relief. Since then, Sister Chan Khong has led Plum Village and other Buddhist practitioners in providing material and education support to communities in need. This support network is called the Love and Understanding Program.

Today, your donation to the Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation supports the work of the Love and Understanding Program in Vietnam and beyond. The program currently funds children’s and university students’ education across five provinces in Vietnam through tuition, food, teacher salary, and supplies. Your donation also supports disaster relief and infrastructure sustainability projects across Vietnam, helping communities build needed wells and bridges.

As part of a community-wide peace-building and sustainability project in Liberia, your generous giving also funds children’s education and nursing training in the town of Monrovia.

Join Us in Continuing Thay

By becoming a supporter, you join many others who want to learn and share these life-changing messages of compassion and peace. Your monthly gift will help more people discover the practices of mindfulness, loving speech, deep listening, and compassion for oneself, each other, and the planet. With your help, we can continue to reduce the suffering on our planet and bring peace to many hearts. To donate and learn more, visit tnhf.org.

Did You Know You Can Leave a Bequest Gift to the Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation?

Thay teaches us that we can never die; we are a continuous manifestation. That is why the Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation created the Cedar Society as a path for practitioners to offer stable and long-term support through bequest gifts. Bequest gifts (planned through your estate or will) are a beautiful and important way to support our spiritual family far into the future. These are gifts that anyone, of any means, can offer. 

To read more about the impact of your donations, please visit tnhf.org/your-gifts-at-work.

“Giving the Foundation a bequest gift is one way that I can help support it with the limited means that I have to live in.”

Loretta, Open Heart Sangha, San Diego, California, US