This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Buddhist Global Relief was founded in 2008 by Bhikkhu Bodhi, an American-born Theravada Buddhist monk and scholar, in response to a gap he had identified several years earlier. After the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami of December 2004, Bhikkhu Bodhi and a circle of dharma friends raised roughly 160,000 US dollars for disaster relief, an effort that left him struck by how few dedicated Buddhist charitable organizations existed to channel that kind of response. In 2007 he published an essay titled A Challenge to Buddhists, arguing that socially engaged compassion in action, not only meditation and doctrine, belonged at the centre of Buddhist practice, and the following year he formalized that argument into an organization built to act on it.
Buddhist Global Relief exists to combat chronic hunger and malnutrition, funding food security, sustainable agriculture, women's empowerment and education programmes worldwide, an expression of Buddhist ethical commitments to relieving suffering carried out through direct material aid rather than through missionary or proselytising activity. Its founding by a single named monk-scholar, rather than by an established religious institution, makes it a distinctive case among comparably sized socially engaged Buddhist relief organizations in the United States.