Joyce's Giving Tuesday Campaign for Happy Kids Center

**** Donations can also be made via Venmo at @thehappykidscenter  ****

I first arrived in Nepal in 2016. I fell in love with the little town of Bhaktapur that had recently been severely hit by the 2015 earthquake. While there, I would notice daily the tiny children wandering the city, collecting plastic and cardboard recyclables during school hours, being shouted out by shop owners and chased by police as they went. 

By some stroke of luck, I one day met a group of American volunteers who I came to learn were working with these children at a tiny organizaiton called Happy Kids Center. They invited me to tag along one day and what I saw felt like magic. These children I would see every day working in the street were running around the center, playing with dolls, dancing, and skipping rope. I knew they were the same children I recongnized from teh street, but they were entirely different at the same time. That is the magic of Happy Kids Center.

I ended up staying in Nepal and helping to manage Happy Kids Cetner for several years after that. Together with our team, we build programs to get the children off the street and into school, to ensure they have a healthy meal every day, that they have healthcare support, and so much more. We also built a child marriage prevention program when we learned that too was a prominent problem for the community. 

Back in 2016, approximatley 60% of children were out of school, most of whom never attended school in the first place. They instead spent their days engaging in child labor --  walking the city in search of recyclables that their parents could sell to earn ends meat. The families relied on the children to ensure they could put food on the table each morning and evening. The children and their parents longed for an education, but it was out of reach even before the earthquake.

However, thanks to Happy Kids Center's programming, the children's futures have taken a turn for the best. Now, more than 90% of our Happy Kids are now enrolled in school and less than 10% are engaging in child labor with no new children joining the workforce since 2016. 

Unfortunately, two years of school lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic undid a lot of that progress. Children fell behind and became less committed to school and parents again relied on their children to work amidst difficult economic conditions. Many girls were also married because their parents could no longer afford to care for them.

The circumstances have already improved greatly over the last year, but we need your help to ensure we are able to lift our community up and get back to where we left off in 2019, and go on to acheive even grater things!