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Our finances
What your booking fee pays for
The fee you pay to come to London Insight events is our sole source of income.
It pays for hire of venues, travel costs and hotels for teachers, our freelance administrator, our website, and everything else that is necessary to run our events. Below, you can find out what your booking fee does not pay for. You can also see a summary of our anticipated expenses for 2013.
On our booking info page you can read an explanation of the different prices for our events.
Generosity: supporting our teachers
Our teachers do not receive any payment for teaching for us. However they are very happy to receive voluntary contributions from participants in the events they lead. These offerings are traditionally called dana. Most of our teachers depend on dana for most or all of their livelihood.
Our teachers are following ancient Buddhist tradition, offering teachings freely just as they received them freely from a previous generation of teachers.
In this way the dharma (the body of Buddhist teachings) is not made an object of commerce, and the relationship between teacher and student is based upon trust, freedom, and mutual generosity.
If you attend one of our events and appreciate what the teacher has offered, we warmly invite you to make whatever contribution you feel appropriate. If you do so, you will not only be saying thank you to the teacher but also making a vital contribution to their livelihood. And you will be helping them to continue teaching on this generous basis.
This arrangement means that organisations such as London Insight can offer events with leading teachers that anyone can afford to come to. And we mean anyone! Because our teachers do not ask for payment from us, we can offer free places to those who cannot pay at all.
For more information about the principle of generosity in the insight tradition, we recommend this page on the Gaia House website.
What your booking fee does not pay for
Your fee does not go towards:
Payment to teachers apart from expenses.
Sitting groups associated with London Insight. These groups are financially and organisationally independent.
Donations to outside organisations. We do spend some money in organising fundraising events for organisations with similar values to London Insight. In 2011 we spent £100 on this, and in 2012 our website costs included the temporary addition a page promoting a charity working in South Africa.
Payment to London Insight organisers, trustees or volunteers, apart from the following:
- expenses
- our part-time freelance administrator's fees
- a director's stipend of £100/month
- in 2013 our director and freelance administrator will also receive funding for a week's personal retreat at Gaia House
2013 Budget
This chart shows how we expect to spend our income from booking fees in 2013. We expect to break even this year, making neither a significant surplus nor a significant loss. If income is sufficient, this year we will increase our expenditure on hotels to offer teachers accommodation which has a particularly good environmental record. This is not currently shown on the chart.
