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About the Trust
A short history of a small organisation, and an honest account of how it is run.
Our story
From a rented hall to a permanent home
In the autumn of 2016, six families living between Pekin and Morton pooled two hundred dollars each to rent a community hall for one Diwali evening. Around ninety people came. The following spring the same group rented the hall again for Holi, and by the end of that year it had become obvious that borrowing a room four times a year was not going to be enough.
The Trust was formally organised in 2017 with a simple purpose written into its founding document: to maintain a place of Hindu worship in Tazewell County, to teach the language and music of our heritage to children born here, and to be useful to the wider town. In 2019 we took a lease on the property at 1804 Valencia Pl and spent nine weekends stripping wallpaper, laying flooring and building the shrine platform ourselves.
We have been open daily ever since, apart from a nine-week closure in 2020. The building is still modest — a shrine room, a classroom, a kitchen, two washrooms and a lawn. We have no plans to build a larger one. What we would like is for it to still be here in forty years, run by the children currently learning their alphabet on Saturday mornings.
Milestones
Nine years, briefly
- 2016 — The first Diwali. Six families, one rented hall, ninety guests and a great deal of improvisation.
- 2017 — The Trust is organised. A founding document, a bank account, and a trustee willing to sign for things.
- 2018 — Saturday school starts. Eleven children, one whiteboard, and photocopied Gujarati worksheets.
- 2019 — A permanent address. The lease at 1804 Valencia Pl is signed in March and the shrine is installed in June.
- 2020 — Closed, then reopened. Nine weeks shut. The kitchen kept running as a delivery service for isolating families.
- 2021 — The Sunday meal becomes weekly. Previously monthly; demand from outside the congregation made the case.
- 2023 — Accessibility works. Ramp at the side entrance, widened washroom door, seating installed at the back of the shrine room.
- 2025 — Fourteen thousandth meal. Counted properly, on a clipboard, by a volunteer who insists on accuracy.
Governance
Who is responsible for what
Small organisations go wrong when nobody knows who decides. Ours is deliberately simple and written down.
Robert Short — Trustee
Legal and financial responsibility for the Trust. Signs the lease and insurance, approves spending above $500, keeps the accounts, and is the named contact for the Trust in all correspondence.
Programme volunteers
Four unpaid coordinators — kitchen, Saturday school, festivals and building maintenance. Each runs their own rota and holds a small petty-cash float reconciled monthly.
The congregation
An open meeting is held twice a year, in January and July, in the classroom after Sunday lunch. Accounts are read out, the calendar is agreed, and anyone present may raise anything.
Our commitments in practice
- No entry charge, ever, for any service or festival we hold.
- No volunteer, coordinator or trustee draws a salary or a stipend.
- Donations are recorded and a receipt is issued on request.
- Children's classes are supervised by at least two adults at all times.
- Personal data is never sold, rented or shared for marketing.
- Accounts are read aloud at the open meeting twice a year.
Come and see for yourself
The easiest introduction is a Sunday. Aarti at 11:00, lunch at 12:30, and nobody will ask you a single question you would rather not answer.