Ratnaprabha at the North London Buddhist Centre in Holloway Road

BUDDHISTS are launching a fundraiser to secure a charity’s future by buying its base, writes Izzy Rowley.

A target of £75,000 has been set by the North London Buddhist Centre in Holloway Road after it suffered financial losses during the Covid lockdowns. The charity is celebrating its 20th anniversary this summer but Ratnaprabha, 68, an ordained Buddhist and the chair of trustees for the centre, said it was now appealing for help.

“We’ve been under the burden of a mortgage for the whole time we’ve been open – that’s £5,000 a month going out on that mortgage, and the pandemic had a big effect on our income, as you can imagine,” he said.

Prior to the Covid crisis, the centre’s main sources of income came from yoga, meditation, Tai-Chi, and Qigong classes, as well as renting out therapy rooms to counsellors and therapists.

“All those streams of income were really quite reduced as a result of the pandemic. If we can stop having the outgoing of the mortgage it would make a huge difference to how free we are just to offer everything to people without worrying about money and trying to charge lots, because we want to keep it at a really low price, or for free,” Ratnaprabha said.

“We’re hoping it may well get to the pre-pandemic levels but, a lot of people do yoga online, and they get some famous American teacher taking them through it. And they think, ‘Oh, if I go to the local yoga centre I’ll have to go to the trouble of getting changed’, and all that kind of thing.”

The centre hopes to expand its reach through the fundraiser – letting more people know it’s there and expanding its services to accommodate bigger numbers.

“We had 46 people in the meditation on Saturday morning, so we do get a lot of people coming, but we’ve got space for more. We’ve got three meditation rooms as well as the yoga studio. Why not make full use of them?” Ratnaprabha said.

According to Ratnaprabha, the majority of people who use the centre are not Buddhist, and it is open to people of all faiths and backgrounds.

He first learned to meditate when he was stressed out doing his exams at Sussex University in the late 1970s.

“I don’t know how to describe it really, but by doing regular meditation and having a bit of perspective on what the human mind is like, you can use it to push back a little bit and you don’t get so carried away and caught up in things like grief, or annoyance, or anger,” he said.