Our Story
From relationships built over decades to a humanitarian response rooted in trust.
Better Burma’s story began long before the organization had a name.
A relationship with Myanmar begins.
In 2003, founder Joah McGee first traveled to Myanmar, drawn by an interest in the meditation traditions that had flourished there for generations. He moved to the country in 2007, and what began as a search for monasteries, teachers, and meditation practice gradually became a much deeper relationship with Myanmar and its people.
Over the following years, Joah traveled extensively, learning from monastics, meditators, community members, and teachers across the country. He spent five years developing Shwe Lan Ga Lay (The Golden Path), an extensive guide to Myanmar’s meditation traditions, monasteries, pilgrimage sites, teachers, and lineages.
That work later evolved into Myanmar Pilgrimage, helping visitors experience the country’s living spiritual traditions while building relationships with communities that rarely had a platform beyond Myanmar.
Listening becomes storytelling.
Those relationships eventually led to a different kind of storytelling. In 2019, Joah founded the Insight Myanmar Podcast, initially exploring meditation and Myanmar’s rich spiritual heritage.
As the country changed, so did the conversations. The podcast expanded to include voices speaking about history, politics, ethnic and religious identity, human rights, conflict, and the everyday realities of life in Myanmar.
A network of relationships becomes a responsibility to act.
The military coup transformed the lives of people throughout Myanmar—and fundamentally changed the role of the network that had formed around Insight Myanmar.
Friends, former guests, meditators, monastics, activists, and community members were suddenly facing arrest, displacement, loss of livelihoods, and severe shortages of basic necessities.
People within this trusted network began reaching out for help.
What began as an effort to help people already connected through years of relationships quickly developed into a wider humanitarian network.
Rather than building a large structure on the ground, Better Burma began working through trusted local partners and community networks who understood where needs were greatest and how assistance could reach people safely.
A growing humanitarian network.
Since then, our work has expanded far beyond the communities from which we began. We support people across religious, ethnic, and geographic lines, including displaced families, conflict-affected communities, monasteries and nunneries, monastic schools and orphanages, meditation centers, migrant and refugee communities, and others whose traditional systems of support have been disrupted by conflict and crisis.
We provide food, medicine, shelter, education, emergency relief, livelihood assistance, and other essential support.
Listens, documents, and shares the voices and experiences of Myanmar.
Turns that connection into direct humanitarian action.
Our story did not begin with an organization. It began with relationships built over many years. When Myanmar entered one of the most difficult periods in its history, those relationships became a responsibility to act.