Team Johanna & Kevin: Fundraising for Happy Kids Center

Team Johanna & Kevin: Fundraising for Happy Kids Center

From Team Johanna & Kevin: Fundraising for Happy Kids Center

In 2015, Johanna and Kevin founded Happy Kids Center as a safe space in Bhaktapur for children in need. Today, the Center is still alive and operating, but we need your help.

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About The Team

In 2015, an earthquake struck Nepal, taking the lives of nearly 10,000 people and destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes accross Nepal. The city of Bhaktapur in the Kathmandu Valley was among those most damaged by the natural disaster. 

Joanna Contat, Kevin Mumford, and Chris Love were among the volunteers hoping to bringing stability back to the Bhaktapur area.  During that time, they fell in love with Nepal and  took special interest in the children from the slums in Bheklukel who they met while begging for rice and spare change in the city center.

As they got to know these children they quickly recognized they were not living the life of children at all; instead of playing or going to school, they were bearing the weight of providing for their families; simply surviving.  Kevin and Johanna decided they wanted to give these children something more sustainable than charity, they wanted to give them a future.

Thus, Happy Kids Center was born.

Johanna and Kevin departed Nepal in 2016, but not before changing the community forever. They handed over the organization to a local team and called upon friends internationally to come and volunteer. 

Initially, Happy Kids Center was a simple, semi permanent structure designed as a fun filled, safe environment for children to escape the devastation just outside. At that time, 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.

Since then, the mission of Happy Kids Center has shifted as we expand as an organization. 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. Today, Happy Kids Center provides 2 meals per day to children in need, provides health services to the community, and boasts programs to support education and the end of child marriage. 

This would not have been possible without the inspiration and ideation of Kevin and Johanna. We ask that you support them in their goal of ensuring Happy Kids Center programs are able to get back up and running post-pandemic so that we can get back to our mission of ending the cycle of poverty, child labor and child marriage in our community. 

More Info

Over the six years since Happy Kids Center’s founding, we have developed programs that uniquely meet the needs of our little community, responding to the root causes of poverty and allowing families to lift themselves up and remove themselves from the cycle. Over the last two years, however, our efforts were been redirected. Instead of focusing on getting children off the streets and into school, we had to do just the opposite -- ensuring every child and parent was safe and secure in their homes. We did so by making sure everyone had enough to eat and drink and had access to all the supplies they woudl need protect themselves and their families amidst the Covid-19 pandemic.

However, this Giving Tuesday we are looking forward to brighter days as we begin to relaunch our programs and get back to our mission. We recognize that over the next year we will need to work harder than ever to get our community back on track. According to the World Health Organization, "the COVID-19 pandemic is estimated to disrupt the efforts made so far to end child marriage, and is expected to result in 13 million more girls forced into early marriages between 2020 and 2030." At the same time, with schools closed and extreme poverty on the rise, decades of progress in the work against child labor is being threatened worldwide, according to UNICEF. We refuse to let our community backtrack. We need your help to ensure that when it is safe we will be able to relaunch all of our programs and come back to the fight against child labor and child marriage stronger than ever.

Our Happy Kids and their parents thank you in advance!

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