Interest Groups & Departments

There are groups within Amida-shu that are specifically concerned with special areas of action as follows:

Socially Engaged Buddhism
Campaigning on such issues as:
- Campaign against the arms trade
- Assisting Refugees an Asylum Seekers
- Assistance to AIDS sufferers in Africa
- Campaigning on Ecological and Animal Issues
- Peace Work
If you are interested in these areas plase contact Sr.Modgala
Also, do visit the Green Amida website on ecologial issues and A Witness to Suffering on animal campaigns.

Aid Projects
Amida
- sponsors an Education & Literacy Project in Delhi - item
- supports the Tithandizane Primary Health Care Project in Zambia
- has funded the building of a dormitory for orphans at Niet Bahn Pagoda, Vietnam
- supports ecology projects in Hawaii and France.
- has sent aid and workers to Bosnia and Kossovo

Chaplaincy
Amida-shu is increasingly involved in chaplaincy development, both nationally and locally in Leicester, Newcastle and Sheffield. This includes chaplaincy work in hospitals, universities and custodial facilities. We are also beginning to establish a detached chaplaincy service in Leicester city centre focussed on assistance to any person with spiritual needs with some particular concern with those with mental health problems.

Organizations Group
The Organizations Group is a loose association of people interested in the application of Buddhist princuiples to organization development. There is an associated weblog called Buddha on the Board and a meeting is generally scheduled on the day following the Living Buddhism Conference. Other events are scheduled occasionally.

Conference Planning Group
Planning the Next Living Buddhism Conference
If you are interested, please contect Sundari

Academic Affairs
This is not a specifically Amida-shu item, but our teache Dharmavidya is the convenor for the European Buddhist Union Acdemic Board which exists to promote Buddhist education in Europe. If you have a particular interest in this area or are involved as an education provider, do get in touch: dharmavidya@amidatrust.com

Gardens
The Irene Brazier Memorial Fund exists to foster Buddhist faith through ventures that involve gardens an also to promote gardening as a Buddhist practice. Gardening here may be taken in the widest sense as including forestry, ecology, preservation of wilderness and all forms of plant husbandry. Irene Brazier was senior bomori of The Buddhist House and mother of the Head of the Amida Order. She died in 2004. She had been a keen gardener and her spirituality was closely associated with contact with natural things and co-operation between humans and nature. The IBMF was set up to honour her memory.