Live from New Vrindaban Dham
Club 108 team members:
Tapahpunja Dasa: Educational Outreach/Resource Management/Hands-on farming and gardening/Charitable outreach
Bhakta-Chris Fici: Minister of Informaton/Media Producer/Secretary/Gardening Apprentice 
Jaya Murari Dasa: Technical Assistance/Spiritual Advice/Historian-At-Large/Slide and Photo Archiving
Arya Siddhanta Dasa: West Coast Representative/Newsletter Design
Contact info:
by phone at (304) 843-1600 (ext 101)
by e-mail at nvclub108@gmail.com
Our office is located on the first floor of the Radha-Vrindaban Chandra Temple-Administrative Wing-First door on the left from the front of the temple.
Well, we are back with more great news from the Club 108 front here in the holy hills of West Virginia. Stay tuned to our Club 108 blog (www.nvclub108.blogspot.com) for all the latest and greatest, and we hope and pray for your continued support. Without further ado...
2007 Grand Harvest Attracts Students and Professors
Students and professors from two West Virginia schools visited New Vrindaban on Sunday, September 20, 2007 to help harvest this year’s bounty of organic produce. Dr. Sven Verlinden and Dr. Bill Bryan, professors at West Virginia University’s Plant and Soil Science Division, were joined by eight undergraduate students for a two-hour tomato harvest marathon in the Garden of Seven Gates. The crew picked about ten bushels and then jaunted off to see Prabhupada’s Palace and to enjoy the Sunday Feast. A day earlier, Dr. Barbara Liedle and four students from West Virginia State University in Institute, harvested 50 bushels of butternut squash. The squash harvest was conducted to gather research data on organic varieties as part of the Organic Seed Partnership. This is the second consecutive year in which SANTEE Farm and Gardens was chosen as a performance target for the grant.
Click here and here for articles about each of these visits.
KEEP ON CHANTING IN THE FREE WORLD!
We wait with baited breath and urgent prayers as the mighty Federal Communications Commission now examines the completed application for the New Vrindaban FM radio station. News of the application’s status will be coming down to us in the next few weeks. In the meantime, we move ahead by calling out to the New Vrindaban community and beyond for practical and logistic support. Those on the Club 108 mailing list have already received a early version of our programming guide, so if you have any opinions and suggestions as to programs you would like to hear or even be involved in, let us know by e-mail, phone, or friendly office visit. We are also looking for technical support in making our station available worldwide on the Internet. Also, we would love to have an artistically-inclined individual such as you or yours design the radio station logo. If all goes well, by next spring at the latest, your spiritual life will be enhanced by the sweet and transcendental sounds emanating from the holy hills of West Virginia.
JOIN THE CLUB 108 MAILING LIST
So many of our friends and well-wishers are already receiving up-to-date news and articles about our plans and progress via the Club 108 mailing list. If you are receiving this newsletter and you are not on the mailing list, and would like to be, drop us a line at nvclub108@gmail.com, and we will gladly include you in all the fun. Our mailing list features news and views, articles and links relating to our projects, ideas, and concerns, and allows you exclusive access to helping us with our efforts to create so many unique outreach opportunities for the benefit of every soul in the world. If you are already on the mailing list, please help us by letting members of your community know about Club 108, and we will be glad as all get-out to include them as well. Keep checking your friendly inbox for more in the days and weeks to come.
A DATABASE OF DELIGHTS
In order to live up to our duty and motto to enhance your spiritual experience in so many colorful and fantastic ways, we would like you to be a big help in putting our community together. Right now, we are in the preliminary stages of developing a database of devotees that will reach out across the world, allowing us easy access to inform and inspire you with our plans and projects, and also allowing members of our community to network with each other in a more instant and user-friendly way. With your permission, we are asking you to provide us at least with your name, location, and e-mail address, and if you so desire, your mailing address, age, business, and phone number. You can send us this information confidentially at nvclub108@gmail.com, so that we can continue to expand our database to truly international proportions, while still keeping the inspired intimacy of a family atmosphere. Thank you so much!
FARM TO FAMILY FOOD PROJECT UNVEILED
New Vrindaban’s Small Farm Training Center. A project of SANTEE Farm and Gardens, is distributing free organic produce to four social service agencies in the greater Wheeling/Moundsville area thanks to the pioneering efforts of Julia Charvat. Julia, a student from Clark University, spent 90 days last summer living in New Vrindaban while learning the basics of organic farming and gardening. She combined her farm skills with her expertise in community organizing to contact area soup kitchens with an offer of fresh delivered organic produce. Now, every Tuesday and Friday boxes of produce such as tomatoes, chard, bell peppers, squash and collard greens are dropped of at the Greater Wheeling Soup Kitchen, Catholic Charities, The House of Carpenter on Wheeling Island and Helinski Chidrens Shelter in Grand View Park. The project, called the Farm to Family Food Pantry is designed to connect local food producers with urban residents.. “We’ve steadily delivered for three months now,” explained project coordinator Tapahpunja dasa. “Our goal is to provide quality food relief by delivering nutrient dense vegetables to charitable organizations and local families.”.
THE POWER OF POWER POINTS
Progress continues on our project of slide conversion and digitalizing, in order to bring you, our dearest community of devotees and esteemed guests, wonderful power-point experiences designed to educate and enlighten about the most sublime world of Krsna Consciousness. We are particularly inspired in the weeks ahead to get these presentations online via our blog or soon-to-be created website. Some of our debut shows will feature a guided tour and history of the Palace of Gold, as well as show detailing the “Life of Buddha”, detailing Lord Buddha’s life, words, and relation to Krsna Consciousness in such a way that will attract people of any spiritual inclination and interest. Once again, we are looking for volunteers from the New Vrindaban Community to help us with the services of slide-cleaning and digital conversion. Please stop by our first-floor office in the RVC Temple if you would like to be of hands-on service with this project. We promise an endless supply of laddhus to anyone who will help us.
"CONVERSION EXPERIENCE” STUDENTS FROM OHIO U. VISIT NEW VRINDABAN
Dr. Greg Emery, a longtime friend of the New Vrindaban Community, and his students from the Global Leadership Center at Ohio University visited New Vrindaban during the weekend of October 20th and 21st, in order topersonalize their research on the “Conversion Experience” of a select group of devotees who happily volunteered for the project. This is the fourth consecutive year that Prof. Emery has brought students to New Vrindaban. These very intelligent and open-minded students were given the warmest welcome we could muster, as they tried to figure out why indeed people of all shapes, sizes, and colors decide to “shave up” and become a bonafide devotee of the Supreme Personality of Godhead. Their final papers should make for some interesting reading, and the best of the bunch will be posted at the website for the Pluralism Project at Harvard University (http://www.pluralism.org/)
You can also check out an article on their visit via Brijabasi Spirit, New Vrindaban's down-home blog, by clicking here, and you can also check a wonderful video made by the students of the GLC on their visit by clicking here.
WHAT IS THE MORNING PROGRAM?
This is a question often asked by guests and newcomers to New Vrindaban, and we would to provide some answers. Thus, we are in the final stages of completing a Morning Program guide and glossary that will give guests and newcomers a simple and user-friendly guide to our morning services that will allow them to understand and participate in this most sacred and sublime of ceremonies. The Morning Program guide will include a glossary of terms, explaining such aspects as puja, arati, and pujari, as well as a colorful photo gallery. This guide with be available soon through our blog and mailing list for use in your own communities and temples, as we continue to reach out to enhance and expand the spiritual experience of all those living and visiting the world of ISKCON.
WE NEED A NICE CAMERA!
With a number of video projects that we have in mind, one of our most immediate needs with Club 108 and New Vrindaban Dham is a professional quality digital video camera. We are humbly asking members of our community and congregation to help donate in the effort to provide Club 108 and the New Vrindaban Community with an essential piece of technology that will help to create so many fantastic service projects, with benefits in the fields of fundraising, advertising, historical preservation, and outreach. Some projects we have in mind are a Palace of Gold Memories video, a Palace of Gold Promotional film, a film commemorating the 40th Anniversary of New Vrindaban in 2008, more films of our college preaching programs, and regular video blogs, or "vlogs", showing you in color and sound what is happening here in the Dham.
Our price range is flexible, and our most important consideration is a quality camera (with tripod) that can create professional-quality films (i.e not “home movies”) for the pleasure of RVC and Their devotees. (Some examples include the Sony HDRSR7 DV Camcorder and the Sony HDR-FX1 High Definition DV Camcorder) Please contact us at nvclub108.gmail.com or come by the Club 108 office to help us in this important service.
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