Closes in 10 days
November 5, 2026
BlinkNow Foundation
BlinkNow Foundation is a small US-registered non-profit founded in 2006 by Maggie Doyne, an American who arrived in Nepal at 19 and used her savings to open a children’s home in Surkhet. It funds and oversees a single integrated programme in Birendranagar, Surkhet, in Karnali Province, run through its Nepali partner organisation, the Kopila Valley Children’s Home and School. The US side, based in New Jersey, handles fundraising, governance, and communications; the Nepal side employs nearly all the staff and delivers the work. Funding is almost entirely private donations and foundation grants from the United States, with no significant bilateral or UN money, which gives it unusual independence from donor cycles but also a smaller and less predictable budget than an INGO. Doyne won the CNN Hero of the Year award in 2015, which still drives a good deal of its visibility.
Read more about BlinkNow Foundation
The Kopila Valley programme is unusually broad for an organisation of its size. It runs a children’s home for around 50 children without family care, a school of roughly 400 students from early childhood through grade 12 on a green-built campus, a health clinic that serves students and the surrounding community, a women’s centre offering literacy, vocational training, and counselling, a sustainable farm supplying the kitchen, a futures programme that supports graduates into higher education and work, and a “Big Sisters” home for adolescent girls at risk. Everything sits in one town, so it operates more like a community institution than a project portfolio, and most of its staff are from Surkhet and the surrounding districts.
For Nepalese professionals the opportunities are correspondingly Surkhet-based and school-centred. The largest category is teaching: subject teachers at primary, lower secondary, and secondary level, early childhood educators, special education and learning support teachers, and school leadership roles such as principal, vice principal, and academic coordinators. Beyond the classroom it hires counsellors and social workers for the children’s home and the women’s centre, house parents and child care staff, nurses and health assistants for the clinic, farm managers and agricultural technicians, vocational trainers, and futures programme coordinators who mentor graduates. Operations cover finance and accounts, HR, procurement, admin, IT, communications, and facilities. Contracts are Nepali, through the Kopila Valley entity, and pay is modest, generally below INGO scales and closer to good private schools in Nepal, though housing and meals are sometimes part of the package. Short-term volunteer and fellowship positions are mostly filled by foreigners through the US office.