2024 Year-in-Review
2024 was a significant and bittersweet year for NYF. In February, we said goodbye to our beloved founder, Olga Murray. Olga’s vision continues to be NYF’s compass as we carry out her legacy of empowering Nepal’s children and families with Education, Health, Shelter, and Freedom.
Amid our loss, we will also remember the year for many hopeful and exciting reasons, too. We achieved so much together. To honor all the significant moments of this remarkable year, we’ve created a special timeline of the year that notes many of our accomplishments and events. Please note that many of our more transformative programs—NYF’s flagship Nutritional Rehabilitation Home, our Vocational Training courses, New Life Center’s Medical Recovery Home, Ankur Counseling Center, Olgapuri Children’s Village, and our various scholarship programs—are ongoing and did not get included in the timeline below.
Thank you to all those in the NYF Community for standing with us through such a pivotal year. Your support for our work is appreciated even more than you know.
7,710
children received* nutrition screening through NYF
955
students received* scholarships from our education programs
935
youths trained* in NYF’s various vocational training courses
86%
of trainees found employment within 3 months of graduating
2
Community Learning Centers inaugurated in Saptari District
86
children* called Olgapuri Children’s Village their home
1,549
counseling sessions* completed by Ankur Counseling Center
20,300
individuals reached* through NYF’s transformative programs
*based on reporting from NYF’s last fiscal year between June 2023 and July 2024
As we look ahead to 2025, support from our NYF Community is more critical than ever. If you haven’t already, we hope you’ll consider making a gift today:
The Ankur team organized their annual Psychological Care Camp for the younger kids at Olgapuri Children’s Home. The kids spent time with our incredible counselors for lots of fun and many grounding activities.
On January 27th, our Caste Equality Project (CEP) team conducted an intensive 10-day residential training program for a group of ten local girls from Tirhut Rural Municipality, facilitated by trainers from the Aarohan Gurukul School of Theatre. The project draws inspiration from the impactful street drama programs from NYF’s anti-Kamlari movement in early 2000s. The newly-trained youths will perform street plays throughout 2024 (and beyond!) to raise awareness against caste discrimination and social malpractices prevalent in the communities we are working with.
In February 2024, over 100 people gathered to watch ten girls from Tirhut Rural Municipality, Saptari District, perform their first street drama as part of the Caste Equality Project’s Street Drama Activism. Their play tackles various scenarios related to child marriage. This included dowry negotiations by the groom’s family and self-serving middlemen, the squandering of dowry funds on alcohol, a daughter’s stand against her forced marriage, and harmful consequences for girls experiencing early marriage.
On February 20, 2024, Olga Murray, adored founder and inspirational leader of Nepal Youth Foundation, passed away peacefully at her home in Sausalito, California. Olga leaves behind a tremendous legacy—over 34 years of work that was made possible through the NYF Community. Visit Olga Murray’s memorial page.
In March 2024, Ankur counselors organized special sessions to help children grieve the loss of Olga Murray. The sessions helped the children to bring back their fond memories of Olga and deal with her loss in healthy ways. The sessions concluded with each child writing a letter to Olga.
NYF welcomed newest full-time staff member, Aryaa Regmi, to the U.S. team on March 6th. As a Nepali-American with a background in international development and nonprofit advocacy work, Aryaa has brought tremendous passion and insight to NYF’s fundraising and communications work.
On April 4th, NYF hosted a groundbreaking ceremony for the construction of two new community centers in Saptari District. The ceremony was completed in collaboration with village members, and a respected elder named Chebli Sada performed a “jag puja,” or foundation blessing, to purify the land. These Community Centers will serve as vital hubs for Caste Equality Project programs.
In mid-April, thirty girls (aged 13 to 19) from the rural municipality of Tirhut in Saptari District, traveled with our staff to Olgapuri Village as part of the Caste Equality Project to participate in a five-day Peer Counseling training at our very own Ankur Counseling Center. The training began April 23rd. Building peer counseling skills within individuals will help empower young leaders to make an impact in their own communities.
Spring 2024 marked the beginning of the School Enrollment Campaign in Saptari District through our Caste Equality Project. Beginning in April, our team worked hard to organize all kinds of activities and programming to boost school enrollment in Tirhut Rural Municipality, including:
- Making door-to-door visits to chat with parents, encouraging them to enroll their children in school and answering any questions they may have
- Distributing hundreds of school uniforms and bags to children in the region (handmade by our industrial tailoring students enrolled at Olgapuri Vocational School!)
- Coordinating rallies around villages
- Running return-to-classroom bridge tutoring classes for 60 girls who previously dropped out of school
- Offering free nutritious mid-day lunches in classrooms
The School Enrollment Campaign ran until May 10th. Our team saw an increase of 35% in enrollment over 2023 numbers, with 820 children enrolled in school for the 2024-2025 school year.
On May 3rd, NYF kicked off rallies for the School Enrollment Campaign of our Caste Equality Project. Community members and students took to the streets with handmade posters and marched through their communities while chanting inspirational slogans like, “Send all children to school/leave no one behind!” & “Quality education is our right!”
As part of the Educating Dalit Lawyers program, a National Conference on “Caste in the Judiciary & Dalit’s Access to Justice” was organized on May 7, 2024. All 31 EDL scholars and stakeholders participated in the workshop.
On May 30th, the NYF community of supporters gathered in San Francisco at Founder’s Day for a bittersweet evening as we reflected on Olga’s remarkable life, celebrated her transformative legacy in Nepal, and recommitted to our shared promise to Nepal’s rising generation. It was a record-breaking fundraising event for NYF. Read our event recap here.
NYF celebrates another batch of graduates from our Industrial Tailoring course at Olgapuri Vocational School! We were so honored to have Manjali Shakya, Deputy Mayor of Lalitpur Metropolitan City, join us.
Monthly Mental Health Desk (Man Chautari) has continued in three schools as part of NYF’s Community Mental Health Program, which was launched in July 2023 by Ankur Counseling Center in partnership with Ward 22 of Lalitpur Metropolitan City to address the rising mental health crisis in the communities. This July, an additional Man Chautari was added in a new school.
On July 31, 2023, NYF’s Ankur Counseling Center launched the Community Mental Health Program to fight Nepal’s growing mental health crisis. This year, we marked one year of success of the program, which is increasing access to mental health services and raising awareness about this topic in communities across Kathmandu Valley. Read more about the program here.
On August 8th, NYF’s Vocational Education team organized a Career Orientation Program for youths in Konjyosom Rural Municipality. These orientations are given before training to share information about career prospects to local youths. It also serves as a way for our team to identifying a community’s needs and interests.
A four-day camp was conducted from September 9-12 in Melamchi Municipality of Sindhupalchowk district. The Nutrition Outreach camps were held in four different locations in 4 days. Altogether, 1,454 children received nutrition screening among which 36% were found malnourished 12 children with SAM (Severe Acute Malnutrition) 94 children with MAM (Moderate Acute Malnutrition), and 415 children with mild malnutrition.
On September 25, 2016, Olgapuri Children’s Village opened its doors to provide a permanent, loving home for children whose parents are unable to care for them. On the 27th of September in 2024, the kids and staff at Olgapuri celebrated this special occasion with a joyful array of performances, including vibrant dances and creative skits.
On October 2nd, Ankur Counseling and Training Center organized an early World Mental Health Day celebration for students in three local schools. From powerful artwork on mental health done by Grade 6-8 students to moving poems by the teachers, the event was a beautiful showcase of creativity and awareness. NYF also presented results from a study done on the effectiveness of mental health desks (Mann Chautari), which is a program run under our Community Mental Health Program.
NYF worked on a flood/landslide relief campaign in coordination with the ward offices of Lalitpur Sub-Metropolitan City. Our team distributed relief items, including gas stoves, cooking utensils, mattresses, bedding, and food (large bags of rice, lentils, oil and other groceries) to affected families whose homes were totally destroyed either in the flood or by landslide. Read about the devastating flooding and landslides here.
Urmila Chaudhary is a fearless NYF graduate and advocate who transformed her liberation from bonded servitude into a lifelong fight for justice. On October 21, 2024, she was honored in Washington, D.C., with the prestigious Global Anti-Racism Champions Award, recognizing her dedication to advancing the rights of marginalized communities and combating systemic racism in Nepal. Her relentless activism helped liberate thousands of girls, co-found the Freed Kamlari Development Forum, and secure the Supreme Court’s 2013 ban on the practice. Now in the final semester of her Bachelor of Legislative Law program, Urmila is preparing to amplify her fight against injustice through legal advocacy.
On October 21st, members of the NYF U.S. team and the Board of Directors joined our Nepali colleagues and others as we commemorated and celebrated Olga’s life at Olgapuri Children’s Village. Over 450 guests attended the ceremony. We were deeply honored to be joined by many special guests, including Nepal’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Honorable Dr. Arzu Rana Deuba, who was a close and dear friend of Olga’s.
Thanks to the global NYF Community, NYF meets our ambitious GivingTuesday fundraising goal of $13,284 to provide free nutritious lunches for all 820 children enrolled in school in Saptari District through June 2025 (this campaign is part of the Caste Equality Project).
In early December, NYF organized a four-day Nutrition Camp in the Khadadevi Rural Municipality of Ramechap district, located just southeast of Kathmandu. This camp reached children across all nine nearby villages. Our nutrition team screened 1,099 children, identifying 280 cases of malnutrition—a reminder of the urgent need to continue address this pervasive issue.
Thank you again for all your help making 2024 such a significant year for NYF. We hope you’ll consider helping us make an even greater impact in 2025!