Maggie Doyne: Protectors All Around Us

In 2005, while on her gap year following high school, Maggie Doyne went traveling in Nepal. “I was working with Nepalese refugees in Northeastern India, and I was absolutely in love and at home, finding purpose and learning so much.” One day she and her Nepalese friend Sunita trekked through the Himalayas to visit the village where Sunita had grown up and then left as a refugee. And there, on a riverbed, she saw children breaking rocks to survive. “I felt anger and disappointment. I felt rage at having grown up with things and protections. In that moment, I saw what it was like to be cold. I saw what it was like to be a child laborer. It opened a sense of compassion and oneness: That could be me. I could be her. She is me.” 

The pain and despair awoke something within her. She began to ask, “What do I have to give? What am I going to do about it? It’s easier to stay here and face the sun than it is to turn around and do nothing.” Although she was only eighteen, something shifted, and she knew she had to act. She decided to stay in Nepal. “There is a wrath that comes out when children are not kept safe and are not given opportunity,” Maggie says. “There’s a ferocity in protection.”  

With cofounder Tope Malla, an orphan from Nepal, they set out to change what orphanhood looks like in the region. The two asked themselves why is it that orphanages are dark and dismal, neglected and forgotten? They wanted to reimagine and reinvent that experience. The pair started out small. They had little money, just what Maggie had earned back home from babysitting and what Tope made from being a migrant worker and porter. They learned children needed more than just schooling. “There’s a lot of other things that they are up against, and we really needed a holistic, integrative approach.” They didn’t set up to create a major global organization, but it evolved over two decades, transforming from a home to a school, then adding a community center and women’s center, food and farming programs, healthcare, and aid assistance during natural disasters. Today BlinkNow is a world leader in community development, with more than 175 Nepalese team members leading its Kopila Valley programs in Nepal, supported by a small US-based team. 

“If we care for children, provide love and protection, sanctity and opportunity, they are going to be raised with love and, in turn, they’re going to give love,” Maggie says. “It’s been a twenty-year journey of taking pain, violence, and despair and transforming it into love and hope.”