ISKCON Salt Lake City Krishna Center

The Salt Lake City Krishna Center is dedicated to bring people to Krishna Consciousness and membership in His devotional family, develop them to spiritual maturity, and equip them for their service in the temple and life mission in the world, in order to magnify Krishna’s Holy Name.

"The building had previously been used as an elementary school by the Seventh-Day Adventists for 50 years," Caru says. "So it was a little run-down. Still, the renovations only took about five weeks. My wife Vaibhavi brought in subcontractors, who were very friendly to us, and they worked at discount prices, painting the entire building, installing floating laminate floors, replacing the carpets in the hallway and sanding the floors in the auditorium. We left the bulletin boards so that we could post notices of upcoming events, and transformed the separate library and computer lab into a giant 75-ft. x 45-ft. gift store, filled with spiritual clothes, brassware and jewellery." Meanwhile, rather than having a big temple room, we opted for a smaller sacred area, with a separate cultural auditorium, as favored in South-Indian temples at Guruvayur and Udupi, as well as at ISKCON Pune.

The temple room, therefore, is a converted classroom that could hold sixty to a hundred people. Currently it is home to a temporary altar and small brass Radha-Krishna Deities, although a larger altar is on order from Mayapur, India, and 30-inch (75-cm) marble Deities will be installed as soon as a qualified devotee comes forward to serve as their full-time priest. Next move is to continue reaching out to the community, estimate that 50 percent of the Indian population and 60 percent of Westerners still just associate us with Spanish Fork, and don't know we're here. We also need to connect with the 30,000 students at the University of Utah, just twenty blocks from us. Regular Bhagavad-gita classes, as well as Krishna-conscious 'transformational seminars,' are also on the cards. "We want people who come to the temple to leave transformed," Caru says. "So we put a lot of thought into our talks. They're usually somewhat different from your standard ISKCON temple class — the speaker stands at a podium, uses PowerPoint, and talks about contemporary issues, with lessons from the scriptures and Srila Prabhupada's life.  In the future — in as soon as four or five years' time — we have plans to build a large Rajasthani-style temple on the four acres of land ISKCON now owns right in the center of Salt Lake City. 
Web site: http://www.utahkrishnas.org
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