About Heart of Nepal
Heart of Nepal was founded in 2020 in Indrawati Rural Municipality — Sipapokhare Ward 7 and Bhimtar Ward 12, Sindhupalchowk — by people from the communities we work with. We are Dalit and Janajati. We don't represent the village. We are the village.
Act I · Founding
Before COVID, before the convenings, before the awards — there was a kitchen, a classroom, and a savings tin. Co-founder Aishworya Shrestha, then a graduate student, came back to Indrawati during the pandemic to do what neighbours have always done: ask, listen, then act.
The first program was the Annadan — a school-day meal cooked by mothers. The second was a tuition centre when the rural schools couldn't keep children inside the curriculum. The third was a women's savings group that already existed informally and just needed a ledger and a lock.
We never set out to be a nonprofit. We became one because the work needed a structure that would outlast any single person.
Field photo · Indrawati partner school welcome
Act II · Approach
We don't impose models. We learn from and build with communities who have long practiced resistance, survival, and care. The savings groups were already meeting. The mothers were already cooking. The children were already showing up. Our job is to make those acts of care durable — and to refuse the language of rescue.
"Real peace shows up before tragedy. It shows up as protection: quiet, ordinary, and everywhere."
We name communities specifically — Dalit, Janajati, Chepang — not as deficits but as people with histories and authority. We don't write about "the poor"; we write about families whose exclusion has a name and a structure. We measure scale through what mothers and children say works — and we publish the numbers so funders can hold us accountable to those answers.
Co-founder
Aishworya Shrestha · Co-founder
Aishworya leads strategy, partnerships, and field design for Heart of Nepal. She is a PhD student at the Columbia School of Social Work, where her research grounds the decolonial framework we work inside.
Act III · Vision
Our vision is an Indrawati where Dalit and Janajati children belong in the classroom by default, where women decide what their savings buy, and where caste is a fact of history — not a fact of geography. We expect this to take a generation. We are paced for that.
Three quiet promises
No child outside the classroom.
Zero dropouts reported in 2024–25 across our partner schools. The next milestone is keeping that number through the next monsoon cycle.
No mother without options.
Every woman in our partner wards has access to a savings group, livelihood training, and a paid role in the school kitchen if she wants it.
No program without the community's signature.
Every new initiative passes through a ward-level review before a single rupee is disbursed.
With gratitude
Foundation CIAO KIDS in Lausanne, Vital Voices, the UN Youth Office, Globethics, Estée Lauder Beautiful Forces — and every individual diaspora donor who has trusted a small organisation to keep our promises.
