Ottawa hosts “Fun, Fund and Flourishing”

Friends of all ages sing together at the gathering.
Photo: Louis Brunet

A sector [1] in Ottawa, Ont. organized a fundraiser to help meet the contribution goals for the Spiritual Assembly. The sector has organized many successful fundraisers in the past, and decided to do something different this time. The friends in this sector wanted this gathering to explore the connection between growth and sacrificial giving. 

We called [our fundraiser] Fun, Fund and Flourishing, and we wanted to include reflections on the connection between growth and sacrificial giving. Our hope was to celebrate some of the great work being done in Ottawa.

We invited some of the friends to speak briefly about their service in the context of the Five Year Plan. Some of these projects have been going on for a while and they have managed to not only be sustained but also to grow and flourish.

Something we wanted to accomplish with the gathering was to increase our understanding of the connection between the hard work being done to sustain core activities and the sustained support of the Funds. The immediate goal of the day was to eliminate the deficit related to this past summer’s youth conference.

A youth shares how they have been serving in the context of the Five Year Plan.
Photo: Louis Brunet

A key difference in our approach this time was that we wanted to emphasize the spiritual nature of our contributions to the Funds of the Faith. In the past, we have tended to address such deficits more as financial situations that need to be corrected through financial solutions such as fundraising events.

One of the very interesting things that was shared at the gathering is that sacrificial giving has historically been the cause of the prosperity of the contributors. As we heard, this was true in Iran in the first half of the 20th century. We read a transcript of a talk Dr. Arbab gave in India in 1991, in which he summarized the transformation that took place in the Bahá’í community of Iran between 1900 and 1950. He said:

“They listened to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and accepted his idea that to become prosperous one had to give. You see, that is a very contradictory idea. It needs faith because most people think in order to become prosperous you have to accumulate. He told them if you want to become prosperous, give, and they accepted. They obeyed.”

– Sector 7 Coordination Team

[1] “In the most advanced clusters, because of increasing complexity, it has become necessary to subdivide the cluster into smaller areas . . . Large urban centres under the jurisdiction of one Local Spiritual Assembly are organized into sectors.” (Insights from the Frontiers of Learning prepared by the International Teaching Centre)