Sathya Sai Baba: Encyclopedia II - Sathya Sai Baba - Organizations

Sathya Sai Baba - Organizations

Sathya Sai Baba is the figurehead to a number of educational institutions and charitable hospitals, most notably the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning and the Sri Sathya Institute of Higher Medical Sciences, located within or near the main ashrams and Anantapur town. These organizations provide free education and health care to the public. They are private, non profit institutions and their admission criteria are not published, admissions being decided on individual merits as decided by Sai Baba or his executives. Many of the patients are devotees from India and abroad.

The trust organization has made large contributions to drinking water projects for the whole of the Anantapur district in Andhra Pradesh and Chennai.

His Educare (formerly called Education in Human Values) programme seeks to found schools in all countries with the explicit goal to educate children in the five human values and spirituality. Schools have already been founded in Toronto, Zambia, Australia, the United States, and several in India. A highly successful pre-school in New Zealand has been studied as a model for public New Zealand schools to follow. As all these operations are public, critics of these institutions and their figurehead online often use that information to e-mail nearby citizens of what they see as a danger. A projected college in Denmark was stopped by local residents who objected to the Sai Organisations as a cult, having seen the film "Seduced by Sai Baba" as broadcast repeatedly on Danish national TV.

All the local Sai Samithis (Sathya Sai Baba groups) are part of a hierarchical structure called the Sathya Sai Organisation. The chairman of the organisation is Michael Goldstein of the USA. The logo of the Sathya Sai organization is a stylized lotus flower with the text of the five human values, highly influenced by not only Hinduism but also Jainism and Buddhism, in its petals. This text version has replaced the old logo with the symbols of the 5 or 6 world religions in the petals.

The Sri Sathya Sai central trust was founded in 1972 and is mainly involved in charities such as the Rayalaseema water project. The trust has tax exempt status and is a major recipient of donations from abroad though Baba and his organizations rarely explicitly solicit donations. All donations and expenditures are recorded which are documented by the bank holding the sums.

The Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust is the official publisher of the Sathya Sai Organisation. It publishes the international monthly magazine called Sanathana Sarathi. In various nations similar publication trusts maintain in their own native language.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Organizations", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki