Building the Capacity of Small, Brilliant Organisations in Kathmandu
There are many fantastic non-profit organisations working in Kathmandu, struggling to survive while trying to provide help to severely disadvantaged communities. The ISIS Foundation has a policy of supporting ‘gems’ such as the ones below, to build their capacity, provide training, and help them to sustain their organisations beyond the day to day scrabble for funding.
ISIS’s Development Projects in Humla
New Beginnings for Children: Education for Girls
Medical Care from a Monastery
Violated Women and Children
New Beginnings for Children: Education for Girls
We work with Hands In Outreach (HIO), a wonderful organisation which tries to redress the huge gender disparity in education in Nepal. HIO staff support around 100 children, 95% girls, providing them with educational opportunities, helping their families to break the poverty cycle, and encouraging literacy in impoverished communities.
The service that Hands in Outreach provides is highly personalised. It is partly this that leads to its success – the staff know the children, families and communities so well that they can work with them to reduce barriers to effective schooling. They are able to tackle problems such as a lonely child that is unable to function or perhaps a parent who has recently lost their job, and the family needs additional support for a few months until they are back on track. Whatever the issue, the staff have the wisdom and flexibility to work with the family to overcome such hurdles.
As the two staff of this organisation are ‘graduates’ of HIO’s own sponsorship programme, they value the programme highly and are more than aware of the issues facing kids in getting into education, and keeping them there in the longer term.
ISIS also supports the dental and medical care to HIO children, and ‘family support’, which can be anything from buying a family a stove to assisting them to move into better accommodation so that children can study more easily at home. The life of every one of the children who is helped by HIO is changed immeasurably for the better.
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Medical Care from a Monastery
For several years we have assisted the ‘Benchen Free Clinic’, a small medical clinic operating out of the Swayambunath Monastery in outer Kathmandu. The clinic is open year-round, 6 days a week, for 4 hours a day, and they treat around 6,000 patients a year, with support from The ISIS Foundation for medication and medical supplies.
Over the years we have supported the growth of this clinic, assisting them to establish a laboratory and more recently, providing training and supervision weekly from a Nepali doctor.
The vast majority of patients who come to the Benchen clinic are not in a position to pay for medical services and medications. The care they receive greatly improves the quality of their health, and in some cases makes the difference between living and dying. Upper and lower respiratory infections and water-borne disease are still the most commonly treated conditions.
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Violated Women and Children
There is so much that needs to be done to redress the gender divide in Nepal. There are over 100 pieces of legislation which expressly discriminate against women, and feminism and equal rights are a long way from the reality of day to day life.
The ISIS Foundation has been supporting
The Women’s Foundation since 2002. It is an extraordinary organisation, run by a well-known Nepali lawyer and Ashoka Fellow, Renu Sharma. Unlike many of the other organisations in Nepal that work for women and children, it is a truly grassroots group founded by a group of female lawyers and social workers who wanted to advocate for poor, trafficked, abandoned and abused women.
With our support, and with the support of a number of other organisations, they currently run two shelters for homeless/battered women and their children, provide legal aid to women, run an organic, and offer a variety of vocational workshops to provide women with skills so that they can support themselves after abandonment by their families. They are an amazing group and have huge support among women in Kathmandu in particular.
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