Maggie Doyne on The Importance of Collaboration And Listening When Uplifting Disadvantaged Communities

Maggie Doyne has dedicated her life to educating children and empowering women in Nepal.

She believes that everyone has the power to change the world, in the blink of an eye. She is Co-founder and CEO of the BlinkNow Foundation and author of Between the Mountain and the Sky, as well as a subject of the new documentary of the same name. She and her husband and two biological children live in the Kopila Valley community.

Maggie's work has been recognised by CNN Heroes, the Dalai Lama, Elizabeth Gilbert, Katie Couric, Forbes, Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan of Sussex, and The New York Times Magazine.

Maggie discusses the importance of education and community led systems in improving the lives of children experiencing multi-dimensional disadvantage, and her advice for passionate changemakers who are taking the first step of their impact journeys.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - Could you share a bit about your background and what led you to working in social impact and empowerment?

[Maggie Doyne] - To start, it's important to recognise I did not have this planned at all. It was the most unexpected thing in the entire world. I grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey in the U.S, in a bubble of safety and security. I had a mum, a dad, a dog, and two sisters. I had a trampoline in my backyard and rode my bike to school every day.

If anything, I was headed for college, as I lived in a community of privilege. It wasn't a question of if I was going to college, it was which school I was going to get into. Social impact was not on my radar, and it was before the time of social media and being connected to what's going on across the global landscape. I couldn't have even put Nepal on the map, other than maybe Everest!

At the very last minute, I woke up with this feeling in my stomach. I realised I hadn't ever left New Jersey. I had no idea what I wanted to be, wanted to do, or what I was good at.

School was just about doing well on tests and then going to college, and it just felt like I was following the dotted line. I woke up one day and decided I was going to sign up for a gap year.

That was the first step. I did my first semester traveling around Fiji, Australia, and New Zealand. It was so much fun. It opened my eyes up to how incredible the world is outside of the U.S. For my second semester, I ended up in northeastern India. That was my first wake up call.

It was 2005 and I was working with a project that primarily served Nepali refugees who were fleeing across the border from war. I started to see what it meant to live in struggle and I witnessed intense cases of everything from human trafficking to child labour, parental loss, and civil war.

I eventually met my co-founder, Tope, who's this amazing guy who comes from the Karnali region of Nepal. We decided that instead of trying to stop problems once they arrived across the border we should try to get to the source and stop problems at the root.

We ended up coming to Nepal in 2006 and trying to work on issues from the grassroots level. We were trying to stop problems before they became problems in the first place. I was young (being nineteen at the time), bright eyed, and bleary, and it's been nothing but a sobering journey full of learning. It was a complicated process, but here I am today. It's been twenty years; I'm now thirty-eight, and I've been in Nepal all of this time.

I put roots down in Karnali, Surkhet, and we run an incredible community development organisation called BlinkNow. We've grown to 175 team members, and we run everything from a women's empowerment centre, a food and farming program for indigenous local farmers, an orphan care residential home, a safe home for girls, a beautiful full service community school, and so much more. It all started with just one kid.

Could you share more about BlinkNow and the impact these projects are driving for children and women in Nepal?

When Tope and I first arrived in the region, we observed this one fundamental issue, education. It was a major barrier for children suffering from multidimensional poverty. When we talk about multidimensional poverty, we're talking about multiple layers of barriers in a community or region a child has to overcome.

My co-founder Tope is an orphan himself; he lost his dad when he was one years old and his mom when he was nine. He was a child porter working in India by the time he was 10 years old.

He understood the complexities, depth, and breadth of what these obstacles can look like.

What we realised early on was that kids were breaking rocks as child labourers, then selling a bag of gravel at the end of the day for a dollar. Our immediate response was to just put kids into school, and we thought that would solve all their problems. As we got digging into these issues, we realised this blanket statement of just, “putting a kid into school and getting them a uniform” is very surface level.

A child has so many different barriers in their life that are more complicated than just a school uniform and picking up a pen. Our end goal was to truly break them out of cycles of multi-generational poverty, but to get there, what does a child need? What does a child need to thrive and grow in their community?

There's infant mortality, so we needed to address maternal health. We also needed to address the systemic issues surrounding child labour. We needed to make sure children were living to the age of five with things like de-parasiting medications, nourishing food, nutrition, and clean water. Contaminated water is one of the leading killers of children around the world. We needed to address parental loss, because when a child loses their parent and support structure due to death or forced migration, we would see the disintegration of Nepali families.

These issues are complex and multidimensional, so we needed multidimensional solutions.

The traditional charity model was just about giving a kid a backpack, a pen, and putting them in school. We realised this problem is so much more complex. We needed integrative systems designed for and built by the community.

Only people from these community’s know how to solve these problems. That was the key. A nineteen year old American girl has no place in doing this work, my only gift was that I knew I had no place. I knew that I only had questions, not answers. I knew that the community knew how to solve their most pressing problems.

Right away I understood my job and role was to bring my access, privileges, and ability to connect to resources to this project. The rest was to listen, learn, and empower the community to solve the problems they know how to solve and identify the root causes.

That's how we've run our organisation. From the very beginning, we set a circle around a little dry riverbed where kids were breaking rocks. We started to put them into school and learn what those children needed to truly overcome obstacles. Then we followed them on the journey, and as you go on their journey, you can start to build integrative systems.

What a child needs is a thriving community. As you build a thriving community, children start to be cared for.

As children are raised with their human needs and rights met, when they're safe, educated, nurtured, and loved, then they take on the community. They create a thriving, healthy community, and all of a sudden, you've ended decade-long issues.

Now, it’s not that simple. It's about having trust, buy in, true empowerment, a board, and systems set up. That's what we started to do. We started with one kid, then five kids, then ten, and today there's not a single child breaking rocks on the riverbed. We have programs that serve tens of thousands of people, and we are changing the narrative of what community development can look like in rural settings. We've got everything against us over here, but we're changing the narrative.

How would you recommend change makers working in foreign environments navigate cultural differences and systemic issues?

This is where the learning is, and it was the hardest part of my journey. I've tried to put this on paper and find the language required, but it's about asking yourself these deep questions: “what are my gifts and talents? How do I bring them to the world while knowing that my gifts, talents, and goodwill are not enough?”

When you first get into social impact or justice work, there are these emotions that come up. You're angry and ashamed, and this idea of 'me' comes into the picture. It's my job to solve this, I have to fight these issues, and this enraged, self-righteous version of your ego begins to show up.

You see that things are painful, triggering, incredibly problematic, and unfair. We don't want to live in a world where people thinks it's okay others are cold, hungry, and not living to the age of five.

That brings up these emotions. In those moments, it's about taking a step back and de-centring. We have to think of how we work with the community to help solve these challenges. I had to learn that these are not my fights to fight. This is about a collective ‘us’ and this is our journey. It’s the responsibility of the community to step up and take on these issues, and I'm just one small, tiny speck of that, so it has to be all of us together.

Just listening and knowing I don't have the answers is important. I only have questions, and I want to be a part of solving these problems together. I can do my part, everybody else will do theirs, so together we can do it.

Our team is all women, so a lot of mothers and neighbours are coming together and deciding the biggest issue is getting kids into school. Then the biggest issue is creating enterprise, jobs, and empowerment. Then there is also a food deficit in the region, so we have to create food systems. We solve problems together with all of us at the table.

Could you share some examples of the different projects you're working on in empowering women and creating change?

When kids have their most basic human needs and rights met, they do the rest. It’s like a miracle. Kids are intelligent, compassionate, kind, hardworking, and gritty.

When kids are cared for, that's where the miracle and magic happens. Meet a child’s needs, make them safe and nurtured, and watch them become engineers, teachers, doctors, social workers, and computer programmers.

What I've learned, first and foremost, is that Einstein or the person to cure cancer is sitting up somewhere in a Himalayan village. It's just about access, opportunity, exposure, and equity. A lot of it is making sure that kids have their basic human needs and rights met, which is education, safety, and love. It's so simple. Nothing I'm talking about is rocket science.

A lot of the time in development internationally people overthink it. All you have to do is care for kids and they do the rest. Provide education, literacy, healthy food, and they will do the rest. The other programs we have are something we rally around, which is strengthening families and community. Goal number one is kids first. If kids are cared for, that solves 10,000 other problems.

Number two is to strengthen families and the community. If we have thriving families in a thriving community, kids are also cared for. This looks like our women's centre. We bring in women who are widows, suffering from domestic violence, and victims of child marriage and we help them get skills. We identify that these are the jobs out there and we find ways to get these women trained and empowered. How can we get them ready to be placed in a job?

When women have cash in hand, they then take care of their children and families. They enrol them into school and make sure roofs are over their heads. Women and families are a core pillar because we need to stop children from becoming orphans in the first place. We need to end generations of poverty, injustice, and violence. That comes from focusing on kids.

Then we move into things like food, health, helping kids develop as adolescents, and making sure we have systemic integrative systems in place for all of the barriers each child will be up against. Health and wellness, mental health, social work, counselling, and access to scholarships, higher education, and vocational skills, we call all of that our futures programming.

We also get into things like clean air, the environment, and sustainability. We get into metrics and proving it works with our educational systems and care. Then you move into prevention work. That’s the best work there is because it's so much fun. Each year we're turning out a few hundred graduates from the women's centre. We're graduating kids off to college and university, and they then go on and take care of their family for future generations.

We empower local farmers and connect people to jobs and local economic chains. Suddenly, you have schools as the heart and centre that truly service the community as a whole. It doesn’t happen in one or two years. We often want a quick fix. Everybody wants it fast, and what we've learned on our team is sometimes it's slow. Raising children is not efficient or fast. Raising children takes two decades.

Changing your community can’t be done in a second. You don't change anything in a heartbeat. It happens with each generation slowly and by people coming together, from elders to youngsters and everything in between.

We're about slow but permanent systemic change.

We see foreign aid and developments moving in this direction, which is cool because it took us time to figure out. We're figuring it out as a sector, and I think that's helpful for our generation who will pick up the baton and take on the marching orders to bring change to their communities and the problems we see.

What advice do you have for changemakers starting out their journey to create impact in communities?

When looking at bringing about change, and that’s all about asking the right questions. Who are my partners? Who are my people? Who are my stakeholders? Who and how do we change things? How do we get to the root causes of issues? Who can collaborate with? Your ‘who’ is important. For us, our who was the people we serve, and that became everything. The beneficiaries are the people running the show.

Ask yourself good questions is important. Do lots of reading and research. If you come from that community, all the better. The people who come from communities are more equipped to be better listeners. Ask yourself what your gifts, talents, and skills are. What do you have access to? How can you use your power, privilege, freedom, and education to bring the change you want to see in the world? That's how the magic formula comes together.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently creating a change?

There are a few organisations I really admire who I've learned a lot from. They work in this modality of deep-rooted systems change in the community. One of them is Ubuntu Pathways in South Africa. Jake Lief is a friend of mine and he has been a mentor to me. They run a very similar impact model.

There's an organisation called Shining Hope for Communities. It's in one of Kenya's largest slums, and they're doing incredible work in girls’ education. Here in Nepal, there's Teach for Nepal, and I love their work. I love the capacity building that's happening in public schools and change systems.

There's a school in India called Shanti Bhavan that I love who are changing intergenerational poverty through education and equality. There's so much good work out there and so much we need to learn from. Those are four of the organisations I respect and admire the most, organisations I'm always trying to learn from and collaborate with.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend for our audience?

My parenting guru on all things children is Dan Siegel. I've read every one of his books, I feel like he raised these kids with me. With my work, I'm a mum to many children.

My non-profit and fundraising mentor is a woman by the name of Mallory Erickson. She wrote a book called What the Fundraising? that came out this year, and I thought it was phenomenal. I listen to her podcast too: it's incredible. There's a podcast out there called Systems Catalysts that's really good about systemic change and working together to solve problems.

For anyone looking to do an ethical, immersive, deep rooted gap year, I recommend this new program called The Flight School. It's run by one of my friends, who ran Global Citizen Year. If you're looking at gap year programs and thinking about ethical and immersive travel, check out The Flight School. It’s an incredible program for if you want to travel in a way that's doesn’t reinforce the white saviour complex or ‘voluntourism’, and if you want to use your privilege in the right way.