Global Bhutanese Hindu Organization

The Global Bhutanese Hindu Organization (GBHO) is a national non-profit umbrella body of Bhutanese Hindus in the United States and the wider Bhutanese-Hindu diaspora. It was established to preserve and transmit Vedic Sanatan Dharma, the Nepali language, and Lhotshampa cultural traditions among the community resettled from the camps in eastern Nepal after the Bhutanese refugee crisis of the early 1990s. It is registered as a 501(c)(3) charitable organisation in Ohio under EIN 82-2341423, with tax-exempt recognition effective February 2018.[1]

GBHO is headquartered at the Om Center Divya Dham, a 150-acre property at 4270 State Route 309, Galion, Ohio, which the organisation acquired on 14 July 2022 for approximately US$2 million. The purchase was financed through an unusual grassroots mechanism: 108 founding members each advanced a US$20,000 community loan at a nominal 1% APR over a five-year term, raising a pool of roughly US$2.16 million that became the working capital for the acquisition and initial development of the site.[2][3]

GBHO operates nationwide programmes in priestly services, yoga and meditation, Nepali and Sanskrit language instruction, youth engagement, and community health. In July 2025 it convened the GBHO World Peace Mahayagya, an eight-day gathering at the Om Center that drew crowds estimated at around fifty thousand people and is regarded as one of the largest religious assemblies ever held by the Bhutanese-American community.

Historical background

The Lhotshampa — Bhutanese of Nepali ethnic origin who settled in southern Bhutan from the late nineteenth century onward — were predominantly Hindu, with smaller Buddhist, Kirat and Christian minorities. Between 1988 and 1993 the Bhutanese government's enforcement of the Driglam Namzha cultural code, a new citizenship law and a sustained security operation in the south drove around one-sixth of the country's population into exile. Over ninety thousand ethnic Nepali Bhutanese eventually spent between fifteen and twenty years in UNHCR-administered camps in Jhapa and Morang districts of eastern Nepal before third-country resettlement began in 2008.

Between 2008 and 2016 the United States accepted more than 92,000 Bhutanese refugees under the resettlement programme coordinated by the US Department of State and the International Organization for Migration, the largest single national intake. Community clusters formed in Ohio (Columbus, Akron, Cleveland, Cincinnati), Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Lancaster), Texas (Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston), Georgia (Atlanta), Kentucky (Louisville), New York (Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo) and several other states. As the resettled population put down roots, local temple committees, youth clubs and cultural associations proliferated, but there was no national religious institution to coordinate Sanskrit liturgy, priestly training and pan-diaspora observance until GBHO took shape.

GBHO traces its formal founding to a First Bhutanese Hindu Conference convened on 1 January 2014 at Charlotte, North Carolina, building on organising work begun in 2013. The organisation was incorporated in Ohio and received federal tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service in February 2018.[1]

Founding and the 108 community loans

The defining event in GBHO's institutional history was the acquisition of the Galion property in 2022. A community-wide fundraising drive was organised around a deliberately chosen number of founding contributors: 108 — a sacred figure in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions the organisation serves, associated with the beads of a mala, the number of Upanishads in the canonical enumeration, and the one hundred and eight names and forms of the divine used in countless stotras and yagnas.

Each of the 108 founding members advanced a US$20,000 loan to the organisation on identical terms: a five-year tenor at a nominal 1% annual percentage rate. The total capital raised was approximately US$2,160,000, which financed the purchase of the 150-acre property and the beginning of its conversion into the Om Center Divya Dham. The structure is unusual in American non-profit fundraising: at 1% APR the lenders were in effect donating the great majority of the economic value of their money while retaining a formal claim to the principal, which preserved individual stakes in the project and allowed modest households to participate in an asset acquisition of a scale none could have undertaken alone. The five-year term was calibrated to give the organisation time to develop the site, begin revenue-generating programming and reach the point where repayment could be managed from operating cash flow.

The corresponding liability is visible in GBHO's most recent public IRS filings. Form 990 data aggregated by ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer for fiscal year 2024 shows total liabilities of approximately US$2,145,000 against total assets of US$2,463,634, a balance sheet directly consistent with the community-loan structure the organisation has described publicly.[1]

As the original five-year loan window has moved toward its 2027 maturity and the broader question of how the organisation will repay the community-loan pool has come into focus, a significant internal development has begun to reshape the picture. At the urging of President and CEO Kamal Dhimal, more than 45 of the 108 founding lender families have pledged to forgo collection and convert their US$20,000 loans into outright donations. At the pledge level reached so far, approximately US$900,000 — roughly 42 per cent of the original US$2.16 million loan pool — is in the process of moving from the liability side of GBHO's balance sheet to permanent community equity. The conversions are described within the organisation as both a practical relief from the repayment obligation at maturity and an expression of the founding spirit of the 108-lender pool: several of the families who pledged conversion are reported to have done so on the explicit view that the original loan was, in substance, always intended as a contribution, and that formally crystallising that intent at the moment the organisation most needs the relief preserves long-term viability.

For a community that was rendered stateless and landless in the early 1990s and then spent two decades in bamboo-framed camps in Jhapa, the collective ownership of a 150-acre religious and cultural estate in the United States is treated within the diaspora as a moment of historic importance. It is commonly framed in Bhutanese-diaspora press as a transition "from Maidhar to Galion" — a reference to Maidhar camp in eastern Nepal, one of the earlier refugee settlements that housed the Lhotshampa.[4]

Om Center Divya Dham

The name Om Center Divya Dham combines the sacred syllable Om (ॐ) with the Sanskrit term divya dham (दिव्य धाम), meaning "divine abode," and the American community-centre naming convention familiar from countless Indian-American mandir campuses.

The property lies approximately four miles south of Galion, a town of around 10,000 in Crawford County, Ohio, on State Route 309. It comprises roughly 150 acres of rolling farmland and woodland, two lakes, natural springs and a small river, and was previously operated as a private family retreat before its sale to GBHO on 14 July 2022. The site hosts a main temple and puja hall, meditation and yoga spaces, kitchens capable of feeding thousands during festival gatherings, guest accommodation for visiting priests and devotees, and open grounds used for the yagna kunda (fire-altar) installations that are central to Vedic ritual practice.[3]

The Om Center serves as GBHO's world headquarters and as the principal physical site for the Bhutanese-Hindu diaspora in the United States, notwithstanding the dispersed nature of the community. Development of the property has proceeded in phases since 2022.

Two installations added to the site during 2025 as part of the preparation for the July Vishwa Shanti Mahayagya have taken on a lasting role in the Om Center's identity beyond the event itself. The first is a full-scale bamboo-and-thatch refugee camp hut replica, constructed by GBHO on the Galion grounds in 2025 using the traditional construction techniques of the eastern-Nepal refugee camps that housed the Lhotshampa community for roughly two decades between the early 1990s expulsions and the 2008–2016 third-country resettlement programme. Built from split bamboo framing and thatched roofing in the same style as the shelters at Beldangi, Sanischare, Khudunabari and the other camps in Jhapa and Morang districts, the replica was one of the major visitor attractions during the 2025 Mahayagya and functions as a permanent commemorative and educational installation on the site. It is the architectural precursor to the larger refugee-camp memorial area planned under the Master Plan described below: an actual, visitable reconstruction of the physical conditions of camp life, situated within a site whose primary purpose is the celebration of the community's post-resettlement consolidation. The inclusion of a memorial hut on the same grounds as the main temple is a deliberate refusal to separate the story of displacement from the story of re-rooting.

The second installation is a Maha Kalash — a monumental consecrated kalash, the traditional Hindu ceremonial vessel that represents abundance, auspiciousness and the presence of the divine — which GBHO has described as the largest kalash in the world. The organisation reports that a formal Guinness World Records application for recognition of the Maha Kalash as the world's largest is currently in progress, with assistance from the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), a Washington DC-based 501(c)(3) advocacy and educational organisation founded in 2003 that serves as a national voice for Hindu Americans on civil rights, policy and community-building matters. The Guinness submission process is still open as of 2026; the organisation has not yet released the ratified dimensions, and this article treats the claim as an in-progress submission rather than an adjudicated record. The Maha Kalash sits in the vicinity of the central Brahmasthan position marked on the forthcoming Master Plan, consistent with the Vastu convention that the kalash anchors the energetic centre of a Vastu-compliant campus.

Master plan and Maharishi Vastu design

In 2025 GBHO commissioned a comprehensive twenty-five-year master plan for the full 150-acre site. The organisation hired Jon Lipman, AIA, an American architect and Maharishi Vastu planner, to carry out a full topographic survey of the property and to design a phased Vedic village layout applying the principles of vastu shastra — the traditional Indian science of architecture and spatial orientation that governs the placement, proportion and cardinal alignment of sacred buildings. Lipman has been a long-standing lead planner within the Maharishi Vastu architecture movement, which revives and applies the Sthapatya Veda tradition to contemporary construction in the United States, India and other countries. The final concept rendering, titled Concept Rendering of Proposed Vedic Village — Om Center Divya Dham, is dated 15 January 2026.

The master plan organises the 150-acre site around a central Brahmasthan — the sacred central point of any Vastu-compliant campus — marked by a kalash, the consecrated ceremonial vessel that anchors the design's energetic centre. Functional zones are distributed in the cardinal directions around this core in accordance with Vastu principles governing where residential, ritual, agricultural, commercial and elemental-direction facilities should be placed relative to the centre.

The central temple complex anchors the plan. At its heart sits the main temple, accompanied by a concealed Shiva temple, a meditation hall, the Guru Niwas residence for visiting teachers and senior clergy, a Shraaddhasthal for ancestor memorials, a Kriya Ghar for ritual preparation, and the Bhojan Alaya community dining hall capable of feeding the crowds associated with major festival gatherings. A dedicated North Gate and associated parking serve the temple precinct directly.

A striking central-axis landmark in the rendering is the Invincibility Tower, a tall multi-storey tower structure placed to the east of the Brahmasthan. The tower forms part of a dedicated Vedic research and scholarship precinct that also includes a Research Temple, a Vedic Pustakalaya (library) and an open Vedic Garden — a combination of worship, study and plant collection reminiscent of the gurukula tradition of linked temple-school-garden complexes in classical Indian practice.

A refugee-camp memorial area occupies a discrete zone in the northern part of the plan and contains reconstructed refugee camp huts modelled on the bamboo-and-thatch shelters the community lived in through the 1990s and 2000s in the Beldangi, Sanischare, Khudunabari and other eastern-Nepal camps, together with cabins, visitor facilities and a fountain. The intent is to preserve a physical reminder of the refugee period as an educational and commemorative space within an otherwise celebratory site — a direct architectural answer to the "Maidhar to Galion" narrative arc that runs through the organisation's public self-presentation.

The agricultural and natural zone, in the north-east of the plan, includes forest and forest camping areas drawing on the existing woodland on the property, a gaushala (sacred cow shelter) for the maintenance of cattle in accordance with Hindu tradition, and an organic farm for the production of food used in temple kitchens and community meals. Recreation facilities on the eastern side of the plan include a swimming pool, a fun park, a playground, picnic shelters and visitor parking.

Residential and care facilities are clustered in the western and south-eastern quadrants. To the west, the plan provides for six guest houses and an assisted living facility for visiting clergy, pilgrims and community members. To the south-east, the plan allocates space for four twenty-four-unit senior apartment buildings — a total of 96 senior living units — reflecting the Bhutanese-American community's concern for elders who arrived in the United States as adults through the 2008–2016 resettlement and who face significant language, isolation and care-access challenges in conventional American retirement settings. A senior-living cluster adjacent to a functioning temple, gaushala, organic farm and community kitchen is designed to keep elders within the cultural and ritual life of the community rather than in a separate institutional setting.

Circulation and perimeter treatment follow Vastu conventions: a South Gate serves as the main entry with visitor parking, balanced by the North Gate at the temple precinct; an internal road grid aligns with the cardinal directions; and low walls or fencing delineate zones without enclosing the site. The plan was prepared at a phased twenty-five-year development horizon, meaning construction sequencing is designed to match the pace of community fundraising and volunteer capacity rather than a conventional commercial build-out schedule.

Organisational structure

GBHO is governed by an executive committee and a board of directors, supported by a small group of administrators. The membership is drawn from Bhutanese communities across the United States, predominantly in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and Kentucky. The roster below reflects the current leadership as confirmed by GBHO.

Executive

Kamal Dhimal — President and Chief Executive Officer
Narad Adhikari — Chairman
Khim Khatiwada — Vice President
Devi Subedi — Secretary
Toya Acharya — Treasurer
Indira Pyakurel — Assistant Treasurer

Directors

Dilu Neupane
Tika Chimoriya
Lok Homagai
Lachu Sapkota
Kumari Regmi
Jay Subedi

Administrators

Shyam Gautam
Durga Mishra
Govinda Subedi

The organisation operates on a predominantly volunteer basis, with directors serving without compensation and day-to-day programme work carried out by community members.

Activities and programmes

Religious services. GBHO maintains a national registry of trained priests who perform lifecycle sanskaras — birth, naming, sacred-thread, marriage and funeral rites — for Bhutanese-Hindu families across the country. The organisation observes the principal festivals of the Lhotshampa calendar, including Dashain, Tihar, Teej, Maha Shivaratri, Krishna Janmashtami and Ram Navami, with services conducted in Nepali and Sanskrit.

Yoga and meditation. Daily virtual sessions are one of the organisation's most sustained programmes, drawing participants from the United States, Australia, European Union countries, India and Nepal, and serving as a low-barrier point of contact for younger members of the diaspora.

Language and culture. GBHO supports Nepali and Sanskrit language instruction for children born in the United States, shastra study groups for adults, and traditional music and dance instruction tied to festival observance. A notable feature of its 2023 and 2025 flagship events has been the deliberate inclusion of female priests in traditionally male ritual roles.

Community health and welfare. The organisation runs medical camps at major gatherings, coordinates funeral support, and partners with the American Red Cross on blood drives; the 2025 Mahayagya collected 49 units of blood, 41 of them from first-time donors.[5]

Civic engagement. GBHO has engaged in advocacy around the position of Bhutanese refugees in the United States, including the 2025 deportation crisis affecting a small number of community members with unresolved immigration status, and maintains working relationships with national Hindu-American organisations including the Hindu American Foundation, which publicly recognised the 2025 Mahayagya.

Media presence and social reach

GBHO maintains the largest social-media footprint of any Bhutanese-Hindu diaspora organisation. Its official Facebook page at facebook.com/GlobalBhutaneseHinduOrganization carries approximately 20,000 followers, which the organisation identifies as the highest follower count among comparable Bhutanese-Hindu diaspora bodies worldwide. In a community whose institutional life has been built almost entirely in the decade and a half since US resettlement began, the page functions as the de facto national notice board for religious calendars, priest availability, board announcements and coverage of events at the Om Center Divya Dham.

Per GBHO's own Meta Business Suite analytics, the page published 80 posts across 45 active publishing days between 1 January and 6 April 2026 — a 97-day window averaging roughly 0.8 posts per day, with clustering around Hindu festival dates, Lhotshampa community observances and board communications rather than a steady daily cadence. Over the same quarter the page recorded 624,291 total views and a cumulative post reach of 378,798, alongside 5,258 reactions, 751 comments and 530 shares, for total engagements of roughly 6,539.

The average reach of about 4,735 per post works out to roughly 24 per cent of the follower base. Facebook organic reach for pages of this size typically sits in the 3–8 per cent range, so the GBHO figure sits several multiples above standard industry benchmarks. The organisation does not report paid promotion on its posts, which suggests the gap is explained by sharing and algorithmic amplification within a tightly interconnected diaspora audience rather than advertising spend. Livestreams of religious ceremonies and sermons — used to connect community members in cities outside the Ohio hub to events at Galion — are a consistent driver of the high share rate.

GBHO's own Meta Business Suite audience-retention analytics provide a complementary deduplicated view of the same quarter. Where the per-post reach figure of 378,798 counts every appearance of content in a feed and can register the same person multiple times across different posts, the audience-retention dashboard tracks unique individuals. By 6 April 2026, 84,913 unique individuals had seen GBHO content at least once since the start of the year, 32,614 had engaged with it through a reaction, comment, share or video view, and 13,179 sat in the tertiary tier of sustained, deep engagement. The 84,913 primary-audience figure is more than four times the roughly 20,000 follower base, indicating that the page reaches well beyond its subscriber pool through sharing and algorithmic amplification rather than being confined to people who have actively liked it. The 13,179 deeply engaged audience works out to around 65 per cent of the follower count — exceptional compared with typical community-organisation benchmarks for sustained engagement on pages of this size, which sit in the 2–10 per cent range. The cumulative curve from 1 January through 6 April is not a smooth ramp but a series of event-driven surges around Hindu festival cycles — Makar Sankranti in mid-January, Maha Shivaratri in mid-February, Holi and Chaitra Navratri in March — and community-notice pushes, consistent with the rhythm of a religious organisation whose calendar year is organised around festival observance rather than continuous daily output.

Viewed over a longer window, the scale is larger still. Meta Business Suite's views dashboard for the 15-month period from 1 January 2025 to 6 April 2026 records 9,293,568 total content views on the page — roughly 465 times the follower base. Of those, 9,288,911 came from organic distribution and only 4,657 from paid promotion, an organic share of 99.95 per cent concentrated in a single five-day test boost in 2025. In effect the page runs without paid amplification and is carried almost entirely by unpaid sharing, livestream audiences and the algorithmic signal generated around religious events. The single highest-volume day in that window, in mid-July 2025, recorded 616,814 views and sat at the centre of a cluster of days each drawing more than 200,000 views — directly corresponding to the live broadcast of the Vishwa Shanti Mahayagya 2025 at the Om Center Divya Dham, whose multi-day katha, hawan and abhishek sessions were streamed in their entirety. Meta has flagged a known undercount affecting views data for 1–4 April 2026, noting that actual distribution during those four days was not affected even though the reported figures may be low.

Content is weighted toward visual formats: photographs account for about 60 per cent of posts, videos 30 per cent, live broadcasts 7.5 per cent and text-only updates 2.5 per cent. The live broadcasts are used to stream mahayagya rituals, kathas and major festival pujas in real time for distant families who cannot travel to Galion. The working language of the page is Nepali in Devanagari script, consistent with Lhotshampa community usage, with English captions or dual-language posts on announcements aimed at external audiences, interfaith partners and US-born second-generation members of the community.

The single highest-reach post of the quarter was a 2 April 2026 announcement of the Shrimad Devi Bhagavata Katha and the Vishwa Shanti Mahayagya anniversary programme scheduled for 6–12 July 2026 at the Om Center Divya Dham. It reached 23,416 people and recorded 10,731 views — roughly five times the average post reach — reflecting the draw of the 2025 Mahayagya and the community interest in its first-anniversary observance.

Audience and geography

Audience insights exported from Meta Business Suite trace the geographic contours of the Bhutanese-Hindu diaspora in a single dataset. Countries are distributed as United States 51.1 per cent, Nepal 21.9 per cent, India 8.1 per cent, Australia 3.1 per cent, Bhutan 3.1 per cent, Canada 2.6 per cent, Malaysia 1.5 per cent, with smaller shares in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar reflecting Lhotshampa labour migration to the Gulf. The distribution mirrors the documented post-resettlement footprint of the community: a US majority, a large residual population in Nepal from the camp years and a growing Australian cohort.

City-level data shows the audience tracing the three phases of the Lhotshampa journey. The top-ranked city is Kathmandu, Nepal (8.5 per cent), followed by Columbus, Ohio (4.4 per cent) and Reynoldsburg, Ohio (4.1 per cent). Jhapa District (3.5 per cent), the eastern Nepali district that hosted the UNHCR camps from 1992 onwards, is fourth. Louisville, Kentucky (1.8 per cent), Pataskala, Pickerington and Etna in the central Ohio ring, and Baldwin, Pennsylvania (part of the Pittsburgh metro) all appear in the top ten, alongside Thimphu, Bhutan (1.1 per cent). The central Ohio cluster — Columbus, Reynoldsburg, Pataskala, Pickerington and Etna combined — accounts for roughly 12 per cent of the entire audience, a share that is concrete evidence of GBHO's gravitational pull within the primary US resettlement hub for Bhutanese refugees and a marker of the role the Bhutanese-American community in Ohio plays in anchoring diaspora religious life.

The audience skews male and middle-aged. The largest single demographic segment is men aged 35–44 at 20.7 per cent, followed by men 25–34 (14.2 per cent), women 35–44 (13.6 per cent) and men 45–54 (11.1 per cent). The combined 35–44 bracket across both genders is 34.3 per cent — the largest age band on the page. Men account for about 62.7 per cent of the audience overall. These figures track the generational profile of the adults who arrived in the United States between 2008 and 2016 under third-country resettlement rather than the US-born second generation, and they are consistent with the broader Lhotshampa-American demographic curve visible in community surveys and public-health research.

GBHO World Peace Mahayagya (2025)

From 16 to 23 July 2025, GBHO hosted the Vishwa Shanti Gyan Mahayagya at the Om Center Divya Dham. The eight-day programme featured 175 officiating priests — 35 of them women — recitations of the Vedas, Rudri Chandi, Srimad Bhagwat Mahapuran and Bhagavad Gita, and mass lighting of ghee lamps in commemoration of Bhutanese refugees who died in exile. Press estimates of total attendance ran as high as 50,000 people across the eight days. A separate BhutanWiki article treats the event in detail.

Finances and transparency

GBHO is classified under NTEE code A23 (Cultural and Ethnic Awareness) and is a 501(c)(3) public charity; donations are tax-deductible in the United States. Its IRS ruling date is 1 February 2018. The organisation files a full Form 990 annually (rather than the shorter 990-EZ or the postcard 990-N), which it is required to do once either gross receipts exceed US$200,000 or total assets exceed US$500,000. The registered address on file with the IRS is 4270 State Route 309, Galion, OH 44833-9618 — the Om Center Divya Dham property itself. Three consecutive fiscal years of full Form 990 filings (2022 through 2024) are publicly available through the IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search and mirrored in the Candid / GuideStar database and ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer.[1]

The three-year financial trajectory tells a coherent story of a community-capitalised organisation moving from startup deficit to sustained positive equity as the Galion property came into active use. Figures below are drawn from the IRS Form 990 filings as digitised by ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer.

Metric (US$)FY 2022FY 2023FY 2024Total revenue134,171534,081376,672Total expenses179,401333,149189,130Net income−45,230+200,932+187,542Total assets2,086,2752,345,9322,463,634Total liabilities2,086,2752,145,0002,145,000Net assets0200,932318,634

Three features of the trajectory are worth noting. First, total liabilities held essentially flat at approximately US$2.14 million across all three years, rising only once (from $2,086,275 in 2022 to $2,145,000 in 2023) before levelling off. This directly corroborates the founding community-loan structure: the 108 founding lenders' principal has remained on the balance sheet without repayment or refinancing, consistent with a five-year interest-only arrangement running toward the maturity window rather than an amortising commercial mortgage. As discussed in the founding section above, more than 45 of the 108 lender families have since pledged to convert their loans into donations at Kamal Dhimal's urging — roughly US$900,000 expected to move from liabilities to equity once executed — but because these pledges were not yet completed transactions at the time of the 2024 filing, the balance sheet still carries the full liability. Second, net assets moved from exactly US$0 in 2022 to US$318,634 in 2024, showing the organisation generated genuine positive equity during its first three full years at the Galion site — moving from a small startup deficit in 2022 (−$45,230) to consecutive surpluses of roughly $200,000 in each of 2023 and 2024. Third, FY 2023 saw revenue nearly quadruple from the 2022 baseline ($134k → $534k), a surge that corresponds to the period in which the Vishwa Shanti Gyan Mahayagya preparation, community fundraising drives and the activation of the Om Center Divya Dham as a functioning site of worship drew large contributions into the organisation.

Revenue composition shifted materially year to year. In 2022 the income mix was heavily contribution-dependent: contributions of $109,431 made up 81.6 per cent of total revenue, with net inventory sales contributing only $5,345 (4.0 per cent) and other revenue $19,395 (14.5 per cent). In 2023 contributions of $267,581 were still the largest line (50.1 per cent), but a large "other revenue" entry of approximately $260,000 (48.7 per cent) contributed nearly as much, reflecting one-off event-related income around the Mahayagya preparation period. By 2024 the revenue mix had stabilised and diversified: contributions of $199,074 (52.9 per cent), programme services of $158,867 (42.2 per cent, reflecting fees paid for ritual services, darshans, temple use, event hosting and similar activities), net inventory sales of $11,691 (3.1 per cent), rental property income of $6,500 (1.7 per cent) and miscellaneous other revenue of $540. A mature religious community organisation is typically expected to derive roughly 40–60 per cent of its revenue from programme services alongside contributions, and GBHO reached that balance by its third year at the current site.

Expenses are distributed broadly between programme services and operating and occupancy costs. Programme services — priestly services, religious ceremonies, katha and mahayagya hosting, community events, and education — are the largest single expense category. The balance goes to occupancy, utilities, property maintenance, liturgical supplies and the general operating costs of running a 150-acre site. The organisation operates on a volunteer-driven model; directors and board members serve without compensation, and day-to-day programme work is carried out by community members and volunteers, which keeps overall operating expenditure low relative to the organisation's asset base.

The organisation's board composition as documented on the 2024 Form 990 included Narad Adhikari as Chairman, Khim Khatiwada as Vice President, Lila Mishra as Secretary and Toya Acharya as Treasurer, alongside more than ten additional directors. The current 2026 board listed earlier in this article reflects subsequent elected changes — including Devi Subedi's succession to the Secretary role — and is the operative roster for current activities; the 2024 filing records the board as it stood at the Form 990 filing date.

Publicly available IRS filings for GBHO include the full Form 990 and the following schedules: Schedule A (public charity status and public support test), Schedule B (contributors), Schedule D (supplemental financial statements), and Schedule O (supplemental information, including narrative explanations of programme service accomplishments and governance practices). The 2022 filing additionally included Schedule I (grants and other assistance). All schedules are downloadable in XML from ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer and mirrored through Candid's GuideStar service.[1]

Significance in the Bhutanese-American diaspora

GBHO occupies a distinctive position among Bhutanese diaspora institutions. General civic federations such as the Association of Bhutanese in America and a network of city- and state-level community-based organisations cover integration, advocacy and mutual aid across religious lines; GBHO differs in being religiously specific, nationally consolidated and anchored to a permanent physical site. Its ownership of a 150-acre estate is unusual among American religious minorities founded by first-generation refugees and is often invoked within the community as a tangible counter-narrative to the 1990s dispossession.

Academic and journalistic coverage of the Bhutanese resettlement has increasingly noted GBHO as a case study in diaspora institution-building. Reporting in early 2026 by WGVU News, an NPR member station in western Michigan, featured the organisation in a two-part series on the Hindu American Bhutanese and Nepali diaspora.

Challenges

GBHO's long-term trajectory faces several documented challenges. Intergenerational transmission of the Nepali language and Sanskrit liturgy to children and grandchildren born in the United States is constrained by the pressures of mainstream schooling and English-medium social life. The capital cost of completing development at the Galion site will remain a claim on community resources for years, though the in-progress conversion of more than 45 founding-lender loans into outright donations has materially reduced the 2027 repayment burden from the full US$2.16 million pool to a considerably smaller residual obligation. A small but visible cohort of Bhutanese refugees faces renewed immigration uncertainty under the 2025 deportation proceedings reported in diaspora press, a context in which religious and cultural institutions like GBHO have assumed some of the advocacy burden traditionally carried by secular civic bodies. Finally, the organisation's reliance on volunteer labour creates obvious bandwidth constraints on its programme ambitions.