Theravada monasteries established in the West, including in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia, have adapted the Kathina ceremony into one of their principal annual fundraising occasions, since a Western monastery typically cannot rely on the kind of whole-village network of small in-kind and cash donations that supports a monastery in Thailand or Sri Lanka, and Kathina day has become the point in the year when a temple's lay supporters, often a geographically dispersed and religiously mixed congregation quite unlike a single Buddhist village, gather to fund a significant share of the monastery's needs for the coming year in a single organised event.
The ceremony's core religious form, the presentation of cloth to the assembled community of monks who have completed the rains retreat, the requirement that a monastery may hold it only once and only if enough monks kept the full vassa, is generally preserved carefully even in this adapted Western context, but the practical scale and character of a Western Kathina, often including a large shared meal, an auction or set donation targets, and considerable published fundraising planning in advance, looks noticeably more like an organised charity gala than the village-wide, spontaneous-feeling communal offering the ceremony traditionally involved in South and Southeast Asia.