Nepal Youth Foundation

The Nepal Youth Foundation (NYF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in 1990 by a group of open-hearted, tenacious optimists—led by lawyer Olga Murray—determined to help Nepali children access education. Over thirty years later, we’ve supported over 60,000 children and families in Nepal to access high-quality Education, Health, Shelter, and Freedom, plus Emergency Relief when it’s needed most.

From a dream kindled on a Himalayan trek in 1984, to a handful of scholarships from Olga’s own pocket and onward to the present day, NYF has always been grounded in the problems facing Nepal’s young people right now. As Nepal’s education system, health care infrastructure, social safeguards, and economy grow and develop, NYF’s president Som Paneru champions flexible, precise steps towards equality and prosperity for children throughout his country. Matching resources from loving supporters in the United States with culturally appropriate, locally led programs designed and implemented by Nepal’s own advocates and experts, NYF is transforming lives, empowering families, strengthening communities, and emboldening a generation.

Blessed Hope

Blessed Hope Nepal (BHN) was established in 2013. BHN is owned by three ethnic Tibetan women from the mountains of Eastern Nepal. We are the first and only business owned and operated by women among our people group. We taught ourselves and our artisans the beautiful and intricate art of bead crochet, and this skill has been the foundation of our business.

Over the years our skills have deepened and we love coming up with new designs together and challenging ourselves to never stop creating. It is our hearts desire to provide good, wholesome, creative work, skills development training and true hope to the women of the Himalayas. We seek to enhance and enrich the lives of the artisans that we work with, who are from villages throughout the Himalayan mountains of Nepal.

Local Women Handicrafts

Local Women’s Handicrafts was founded in 2008 with a big goal: To lift women up who have been marginalized and exploited; to give them opportunity, skills, and a sense of dignity; and to spread our model of empowerment across the world. Nasreen Sheikh founded LWH as a small shop in Kathmandu when she was still a teenager. Having already survived working for two years as a child laborer in a sweatshop, she opened LWH to take control of her own destiny and give herself the kind of hope she’d previously never thought possible. Nasreen soon began to train local women to make handcrafted textiles they could sell at her shop. As she saw the women gain confidence and light return to their eyes, she realized she had the opportunity to spread this work across the world and empower disadvantaged women everywhere. Through the LWH entrepreneurial empowerment model, our goal is to empower 10,000 women in the world’s poorest regions by 2025 and create a textile industry that honors sustainability, human rights and dignity.
I am a feminist and will always shout about it from the rooftops. I will advocate for equality to my last breath.