2019 Year in Review
Photo Credit: Brooke Reynolds, who graciously volunteered to take photos at the OWL Retreat
2019 Accomplishments
At the Boundless Love Project, we seek to create a global beloved community where all life thrives. To do this, we focus on three areas of activities:
• Promoting Self-Liberation: We provide trainings and resources to help people use loving intentions, mindfulness, and inquiry to help integrate trauma, transcend conditioning, and make insights that liberate themselves from mental and emotional suffering. As a result, they live a life filled with more love, peace, compassion, courage, and joy.
• Promoting Principled Nonviolent Action: We provide nonviolence training and resources to help activists be more loving, compassionate, and skillful. As a result, their advocacy work becomes more effective, sustainable, and healing for themselves and the community.
• Advocating for Social Justice and Providing Joyful Service: To end structural and institutional violence, we ally with movements and campaigns nonviolently working to end violence, injustice, and oppression while creating beloved community. We also volunteer our time to joyfully serve those in need.
We integrate all three aspects of mindfulness, nonviolence, and social justice in all the activities we do. Despite this, we attempt to categorize our 2019 accomplishments under these headings, based on the activity's primary focus.
In 2019, the Boundless Love Project accomplished the following:
Promoting Self-Liberation
• We hosted 51 free weekly group meditations. Loving gratitude to Lisa Cleveland for peer-leading 21 of these, and Mindfulness Teacher Freeman for leading the other 30. We only had two guest speakers this year: Theresa Zingery led us in a delightful session of laughter yoga and Christy Schick, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker/Therapist (and the Boundless Love Project Vice President), graciously volunteered her time to speak on the topic of compassion. Appreciation to the Dakota County Library for allowing us to host these events at their public libraries.
• We collaborated with Our Wellness and Liberation (OWL) to put on monthly gatherings. OWL promotes total wellness (mental, emotional, social, physical, and community) for animal advocates and their community. Their monthly gatherings aim to strengthen community, promote spiritual health, and deepen commitment to loving activism. At each event, we check in, meditate together, and share a vegan meal over pleasant conversation. Meditations were graciously led by either Christy Schick, Unny Nambudiripad, Julien Jean-Pierre, or Freeman. The events were hosted at the homes of Unny, Julie Knopp, Greg Howard, and John Andersen. Hosts and participants graciously prepared vegan food to share. Thanks to all of the volunteers who generously shared of their time to help make this happen.
• We also added these online resources!
- Creating Beloved Community training series - a series of trainings to help you deepen your understanding of and follow the Beloved Community Agreements.
- The Beloved Community Agreements that we invite all of our supporters to adopt so we may live in and create beloved community now.
- Twelve Tips to Peer-Leading Guided Meditation - an article to help you start offering meditations in your community.
- How to Peer-Lead a Group Meditation - an article to help you organize a group meditation in your community.
- Inspiring words of wisdom from Jesus - an article sharing insights from the founder of Christianity that are applicable to all people whether Christian or not.
• We assisted Compassionate Action for Animals (CAA) volunteers in rest and recovery after a stressful week of action. In April, Compassionate Action for Animals conducted a flurry of events for Veg Week, an international celebration that invites people to try vegan eating for one week of the year. At the end of the week, CAA hosted a meeting at the Wedge Table's community room in Minneapolis to help their volunteers rest and recover from the busy week. At the event, Boundless Love Project's Mindfulness Teacher Freeman led a meditation and yoga instructor and Boundless Love Project supporter Jill Fuerstenberg led a session of yoga.
Promoting Principled Nonviolent Action
• We collaborated to put on two Mindful Direct Action Trainings (MDAT). At these trainings we promote creative, principled, and courageous nonviolent action to stop violence and create justice. In January, Freeman collaborated with Ethan Nuss from Rainforest Action Network, Alina Yaman of Minnesota Interfaith Power and Light, and KT Glusac to put on a MDAT at the Quaker's Twin Cities Friends meeting hall in St. Paul. In July, Freeman collaborated with Kaia Svien of Mindfulness for Changing Times to facilitate a MDAT at St. Luke's Presbyterian Church in Wayzata.
• We collaborated with OWL and the Metta Meditation Center to do a weekend wellness retreat for animals advocates. Part meditation retreat, part conference, part nonviolence training, this gift economy retreat gave 29 diverse animal activists ages 22 to 66 some TLC, lots of fun and laughter, self-care tools, and insights on how to be more loving and effective activists, while creating friendships and strengthening community. The retreat organizing committee included Nina Elise, Pastor Ruth Sorensen-Prokosh, Unny Nambudiripad, and Freeman. Thanks to our Head Cook Nathan Huerkamp, and the many, many volunteers, speakers, donors, participants, and all others who helped make this retreat possible.
• We also added these online resources!
- Resources for Activists to help activists be more healthy and effective.
- Resources for Animal Advocates to help animal advocates effectively heal themselves and the world.
Advocating for Social Justice and Providing Joyful Service
• We organized two volunteer parties to help feed the Hungry. In partnership with the compassionate people at Feed My Starving Children, we organized two volunteer parties where we package vegan meals to send to people who otherwise would be malnourished.
• We united with Faith Leaders to Urge Governor Walz to Stop Line 3. In February, Faith Leaders, from various wisdom traditions, including our Mindfulness Teacher Freeman, united to tell Governor Walz to file the Department of Commerce appeal to stop Line 3 by its deadline, which he did. The Boundless Love Project cosponsored the event which was organized by Minnesota Interfaith Power and Light in cooperation with a coalition of Indigenous led Stop Line 3 groups. At the event, we advocated for a healthy climate, clean water, the safety of current and future generations, jobs that would help us shift over to a fossil-fuel free economy, and measures to protect fossil-fuel workers and their families during the transition and beyond. Read all about it here.
• In November, Freeman addressed the Minneapolis City Council on the need to ban so-called "conversion therapy" which aims to make queer people straight and gender-normative. He shared his experience coming out as a gay man to his family. He argued that when families are vulnerable and looking for help, they don't need the option to unintentionally abuse their kids and increase family strife. Many who attend "conversion therapy" find it to be abusive, judgmental, and shaming, and research has found it to increase the rates of suicide and trauma in participants, and to intensify rifts between family members. Minneapolis ultimately banned the practice of "conversion therapy" within the city. For more info on this issue, read the Human Rights Council's online factsheet, and consider reading Garrard Conley's memoir Boy Erased or watching the 2016 movie with the same name.
Deep Gratitude to You
Thank you for being a supporter of the Boundless Love Project. As a small, volunteer-led, nonprofit with BIG DREAMS, we appreciate your mindfulness practice, your goodwill, your prayers, your financial support, your participating in our events, your volunteering, your use of our many online resources, and your skillful actions that help create a global beloved community where all life thrives. Thank you!
Income and Expense Report
INCOME
Donations: $11,391.23
Interest: $2.21
Loans: $3,000.00
Total income: $14,393.44
EXPENSE
Programs: $15,404.90 (98.47%)
Administrative: $183.24 (1.17%)
Fundraising: $56.30 (0.36%)
Total Expenses: $15,644.44 (100%)
NET BALANCE
Total Income: $14,393.44
Total Expense: $15,644.44
Net Deficit: $1,251.00
CASH FLOW STATEMENT
Funds at Beginning of Year: $4,548.71*
Net Deficit: $1,251.00
Funds at End of Year: $3,297.71
* This amount includes a $3,000 interest-free loan from one of our officers that we owed at the time, but has now been repaid.
assets and Liabilities Statement
Cash Assets: $3,297.71
Other Assets: $0
Liabilities: $0
Net Worth: $3,297.71
Programs Breakdown
Huge thanks to Unny Nambudiripad who volunteered his time and expertise to raise funds to cover expenses for the OWL Retreat and to give donations to the Womxn Funders for Animal Rights and the Gender Equity in Animal Rights organizations.
OWL Retreat
Funds Raised: $5,745.50
Funds Spent: $5,092.55
Remainder: $652.95
Gender Equity in Animal Protection
Funds Raised: 3,967.13
Funds Spent: 3,967.13*
Reminder = $0.00
* Funds spent includes the monies used to reimburse donors who wanted their money back after the event did not happen. Additional funds raised over and above the expenses were given to charities with similar missions to the event’s purpose: Womxn Funders for Animal Rights and Gender Equity in Animal Rights.
FINANCIAL NOTES
The Boundless Love Project’s preferred method of operation is via a gift economy: We offer our services for free and any beneficiaries who are inspired to support us may give financially, volunteer, or pay the generosity forward by showing generosity towards others in our global community who are in need.
All board members and officers, who handle the day-to-day administrative work, served as volunteers. Thank you to Colleen Wicklund (Board Member), Richard Wicklund (Board Member), Christy Schick (Board Member and Vice President), and Freeman (President, Treasurer, and Secretary). Thank you for your service! If you would like to be considered to serve as a Board Member or Officer, please complete our volunteer application to learn more. Thank you!
Our Mindfulness Teacher Freeman freely offers his teachings and trainings as a gift for your benefit. When donations come in ear-marked for Freeman, they are split 50% to him and 50% to Boundless Love Project. Using this system, the stipend paid to Freeman in 2019 was $432.50. Because donations earmarked for Freeman thank him for his teachings, which are a program, 100% of his stipend is categorized in the programs column.
Operating a successful organization requires administration and fundraising expenses which, when needed, are equally important as our programmatic spending. This year 1.17% of our expenses went towards administration fees, and 0.36% of our expenses went to fundraising costs which allowed us to purchase stamps and thank you cards to share our appreciation with donors.
Thanks again for all of your support. Always remember that: