Member Spotlight: Maggie Doyne
We are pleased to welcome Maggie Doyne, Founder and CEO of the BlinkNow Foundation and 2015 CNN Hero Awardee, to The Co-Co for our Social Impact Series.
In an intimate setting at The Co-Co, Maggie will discuss her journey from a high school graduate in suburban New Jersey, to the caregiver of 50 children in Midwestern Nepal. Through her talk, "Start Now, Use What You Have," Maggie shares her inspiring story and explains why we all have a responsibility to use our talents and gifts to create positive change in our world.
Meet Maggie Doyne!
My journey began when I was just 19 years old and I packed up a backpack for a gap year to travel around the world. I started out in the south pacific and eventually found myself in north eastern India. While I was there, I met so many children coming from Nepal, fleeing from the effects of the country’s ten-year civil war.
Before I knew it, I found myself trekking through the Himalayas seeing the conditions with my own eyes. I’ve always loved kids, but I was shocked to see so many children living with out the most basic things that I had grown up with as a child. I particularly remember meeting one girl, Hema. She was six years old and spent every day breaking rocks by the side of the road--but she had such a big smile and such a bright gleam in her eye! I decided then and there that I was going to do something, so I found the money to enroll her in school, to buy her a uniform, and to pay for her books.
I was proud! But I also realized that helping one child was the tip of the iceberg. I could do more--and that meant I had to do more.
I found a partner in my brilliant co-founder Top Malla, who had grown up in Nepal as an orphan and now worked in a non-profit based in India. With our combined life savings (mine from babysitting, his from his work in India) we bought a plot of land and built the Kopila Valley Children’s home.
Now, 13 years later, in addition to the children’s home, we run a school with over 400 students, a health clinic a safe home for girls, and a women’s center. We recently opened a new campus of the Kopila Valley School that uses cutting edge sustainable design to create a place that’s not just a great place to learn, but is actually the greenest school in Nepal. Together with our team in Nepal and in the US, we work every day to make sure that every child at Kopila Valley is safe, educated and loved.
I’m still proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish. And I still know that there’s more we can do--and we have to do.
BlinkNow is always looking for more supporters to spread the word about what a huge difference we can make in the life of a child when we just put our hearts into it!