
When we spoke, Catherine Kairavi managed the fundraising department of Ananda. (Photo: 2012)
Q: I wondered if I should talk to you, since your position as director of fundraising isn’t what many people would normally think of as serving others. But nonprofit businesses are proliferating, and donations may continue to provide an important slice of the funding to sustain spiritual cooperative communities. At any rate, can you talk about what you do?
Catherine: I see my job as encouraging people to help fund Ananda’s ministry. Paramhansa Yogananda and Swami Kriyananda both said that people receive tremendous blessings from supporting a work such as this. And if you understand donations of money as giving of your energy, it’s a very personally meaningful way to support Yogananda’s mission.
My job is not just to draw them into the process, but to help them feel that they aren’t just mailing a check – that they’re serving Yogananda. So my role has two aspects. One is to inspire people to serve through their donations, and the other is to provide feedback that helps them feel that by giving they’ve not only served Master but they’ve helped other people like themselves.
Before I became involved with fundraising, I helped out with various projects, from building The Expanding Light to publishing a paperback edition of Swami Kriyananda’s autobiography, The Path: My Life With Paramhansa Yogananda.
We were afire with enthusiasm, and we had all these wonderful ways to touch people with the teachings. Of course, the limiting factor was always money, and it wasn’t long before I began to feel that I’d give anything to be able to tackle that one. And then Divine Mother gave me that area of responsibility, and I got the opportunity to try to fix the bottleneck.
Q: How did you begin?
Catherine: I was Ananda’s first full‑time fundraiser. I started by attending a week-long course where I learned the classic model for non‑profit fundraising. I learned that there were two kinds of fundraising: capital campaigns to raise money for major projects, and an annual appeal that supports the general budget and operating expenses.
They talked about ways to build long-range fundraising into your organization through special fundraising events, planned giving, and bequest programs. So I got a thumbnail course, and when I came back to Ananda we immediately began raising funds to build The Expanding Light.
We’d built the concrete foundation which was sitting in the rain, waiting for a building to be raised. And I immediately betrayed the first principle of fundraising that I’d been taught, which is that you never, ever, undertake a capital campaign unless you’ve had an annual campaign in place for many years.
So of course we had to start with a capital campaign. The standard theory is that until you’ve conducted an annual appeal, you won’t have any idea who’s interested in you and what gifts they might be able to give.
But Ananda was a little different, in that we knew our people from other avenues of contact. We didn’t necessarily know what they would give, because we’d never asked, but we’d been serving people for many years through the Ananda Spiritual Family. And in fact, that first year we had a lot more success with loans than outright gifts.
But it was a great experience, because it forced me to get on the phone and overcome my fear or shyness or pride, and start asking people, “Can you help us with this project?”
It was great to see what can happen when you put yourself on the line and start making cold calls. You have to get real impersonal about who you are and why you’re asking people for donations. You have to remember that it’s not you who are asking – that you’re asking on behalf of Paramhansa Yogananda and Ananda, so you need to be asking with a certain centeredness and dignity that derives from the nobility of the cause.
You learn to get out of any thought of yourself and your personal shyness, because you’re being asked to get a whole lot bigger, or you’ll never be able to ask for money. So starting with a capital campaign was a wonderful experience, because I was thrown in at the deep end, and I had to learn the principles real fast.
There was an interesting sense that has grown in me over the years, that the people who give to a project will bond with the project because it becomes part of them. When someone gives money to Ananda, we’ve always seen that they immediately feel closer and they feel more like family. Swamiji said that if you want to make someone your friend, ask them to do you a favor.
Q: Master said, “Friendship is based on mutual usefulness.” It may sound a little mercenary, but really it’s true. There’s something about being useful that opens your heart to others.
Catherine: If you create a feeling in someone that you need them, and that they are integral to something that’s important to you, they begin to feel like part of you.
If people feel that Ananda will go on without their help, they won’t feel a part of it to the same extent. They won’t feel essential to it, and they won’t feel like they’re being served. Fundraising is a vital way to help people serve Master’s cause. I would sometimes ask people to imagine what would happen if someone walked in the door with millions of dollars and told the rest of us to put our wallets back in our pockets. I ask people to meditate on what it would feel like in their hearts. And it’s a very contractive feeling – you feel smaller, diminished, and pushed out of the circle.
It’s a feeling that the project doesn’t need anything from you to help it grow. You aren’t being asked to roll up your sleeves and put your energy into it. And that isn’t the way people grow.
Q: Devamuni Hall tells a wonderful story. He was asked to do the wiring for the Paramhansa Yogananda museum at Ananda Village, but he couldn’t afford fixtures of the best quality, so he decided to contribute his labor. He had never done that before, and he didn’t know what would happen. But he went ahead, and the day after he finished the job, he got a major contract that recouped his labor costs on the museum job in one week. And afterward there was a string of jobs that poured in.
Catherine: That is a great story.
Q: I mention it because you’re suggesting that you’re really doing people a big favor by asking them to contribute to a spiritual work.
Catherine: It’s the same as when people get involved with any part of the ministry. I’ve learned that giving helps people. It helps them open their hearts. I’ve found that people who don’t give financially eventually leave the work. Sooner or later, you have to open up that part of your life to God. On the spiritual path, you have to learn to relate to money as energy, and to see it all as God‑given. Unless you’re willing to let God flow back to His children through you, that contractive consciousness will, in time, throw you out of attunement.
It’s a very rare individual who hasn’t spiritualized that part of his or her life and has still managed to go deep spiritually. I’ve seen the people who give getting more, spiritually. They seem to have an easier time dealing with the doubts and dilemmas and tests of faith that come on the path. It softens their hearts. God is more their partner. So I do see my work as a ministry. I see it as a service to people, to ask them for money.
But my job is to do it in a way that is as inspiring as possible, and that keeps it on the highest plane. So they know it’s never just giving to a build a temple, it’s to serve Master, and to serve other people. You have to keep it on a spiritual level, where it truly belongs.
Q: If people receive blessings, it’s spiritually valid.
Catherine: They definitely do. You just have to help them know that Paramhansa Yogananda is behind the project.
Q: Is personal contact important when you’re trying to convey a spiritual vibration, and a spiritual work?
Catherine: It is. I try to create all of the written pieces, and it’s why I’ve started creating videos. I started making an annual appeal video two years ago, and we produced an audiotape with selections of Swamiji’s newest music.
Every year I struggle to work with the written medium and the mailing list. I’m always asking how we can make it as intimate and genuinely sincere as possible. How can it be as powerful as possible? The video was one answer. Anybody who gave us a dime in 1994 would get one of those videos.
But I’m not sitting with my calculator, thinking “Well, we’re probably going to get this much back if we do such-and-such.” It isn’t the right question. It’s always a question of how to give people the most intimate, powerful experience of the vibration that is coming through Ananda right now. And that question will get answered differently each year.
This year, I think it’s the music. We’ll send out something like a thousand recordings. They’ll be included with the annual appeal letter, and then I’ll go out to the colonies and talk about the ministry. We’ll do some calling, and as people attend programs here we’ll make sure to acknowledge that they are giving, so they know that their service is honored.
Q: I don’t know if this is a question or not, but I’ll say it anyway. Ananda wants to show that spirituality is practical, yet we ask people for lots of money. Is that a contradiction?
Catherine: It’s important that people understand what we’re asking them to give money for. We aren’t asking them to help support the Village infrastructure – the houses, the roads, the plumbing, the playing fields. We’re asking them to support the people and the activities that are spreading the teachings and vibrations of Paramhansa Yogananda.
Because we do urgently need to show people that this community model works in today’s world. But if this place were supported only by donations, we wouldn’t have a viable model. So we’re only asking for help with the healing prayer ministry, the Kriya Yoga ministry, the discipleship training course, and the online ministry. Donations also support local Ananda meditation groups, the development of ministerial training materials, the effort to put ministers on the road, our 800 phone line, the correspondence, and the counseling and ministerial support.
It has nothing to do with running Ananda Village, but it supports the process that creates other inspiring communities. It’s why we urge the colonies to support the yearly appeal, because it’s part of the process that brought their community into being.
I smile when I remember how we put two ministers on the road in a car with cracked windows in 1982. They drove up and down Route 5 with $5 in their pockets conducting satsangs, and eight years later it was that effort that effectively created Ananda Seattle.
That’s the process we’re continually feeding our energy into – we’re creating something that will be strong and that will support the local people, and we’re also supporting the people in the Midwest who may not have a community but need our support.

Q: As the work grows, will it continue to feel intimate, because it’s serving people in the ways you’ve described?
Catherine: We’ve got to do it that way, because that’s the heart of Ananda. It’s a very important issue in the lawsuit that SRF filed against us – that we believe the spark of Yogananda’s inspiration doesn’t get passed from an organization to the individual, but from one individual to the next, and from one devotee’s heart and wisdom to those who are receptive and are longing for it.
It’s person to person first and always, and it can never be faceless. As we grow, even if the office has a hundred people, the one‑to‑one contact can never change, or we might as well shut down.
Q: I remember visiting Ananda for the first time and being inspired by the spiritual vibrations I felt here, and by the divine presence I could see in people’s eyes, and that I could sense in their lives.
Catherine: There’s no substitute for it, and there never will be. It will be a challenge to keep that spirit, and we’ll need to be very clear always that personal contact is the essence of the way people can grow spiritually. The printed page will inspire them, but there has to be that spark from one to another.
Devi told me about a Christmas gathering where Swami made an appearance. He’d had a minor stroke that same morning, but he insisted on coming upstairs, and once he got there he put out tremendous energy. Devi said that she walked out feeling really angry with him. He ended up having to go into the hospital on Christmas Eve. But she said she was so upset, “Why does he have to do that?” But then she realized that if she came into a room that was messy and sloppy, where the flower arrangements were falling over and there was dust in the corners, she would feel driven to straighten, neaten, and beautify, just as he had felt driven to give his energy and blessings.
Everyone has a relationship with money. It’s an important question – how will I deal with money? What will I do with the money I receive? What can I do with that money that will make me feel good and give me greater happiness?
This is why I think of fundraising as a ministry. The profit margin is fabulous, of course, but it’s not a business, rather it’s a very powerful investment in everyone’s happiness. And if their happiness is what you’ve decided to invest in, the returns are going to come to you as intangibles such as greater joy in yourself, deeper attunement with God, and gratitude to feel connected to a ministry that has served you so beautifully.
It’s ultimately asking people to invest in the consciousness of mankind. Most of those who are already involved with us don’t have trouble with that thought, because it’s all they’re really interested in, and it’s thrilling to work with those people. I’ve learned a great deal from the people I work with, about what comes back to you through giving.
Q: In Education for Life, Swami Kriyananda talks about a basic principle of life, that if you can use your body, feelings, will, mind, and soul expansively, it will give you joy, and the “return on investment” is automatic because it’s the cosmic law.
Catherine: There appears to be a growing awareness that running a business based on honesty and service is the only way it will return the ultimate benefit of happiness in the long run. It feels like more and more people are beginning to be ready for something like that.