The Youth Outreach Program is a way for Conscious Impact volunteers to engage with students in our village and the surrounding area at both the primary and secondary level. The main focus of our program is not to take the place of teachers in government schools, but to provide access to activities and information currently absent in the standard curriculum. Consequently we want our work to help cultivate the following skills in students: leadership, creativity, teamwork, and confidence.

So far, volunteers have put together and implemented workshops around environmental sustainability, art, yoga, and sexual health education. Our work focuses on collaboration with local teachers and finding ways we can support them as educators.

Our work is always open, experimental, and intentional. We invite volunteers from all walks of life who are interested in early childhood education, non-traditional learning, and youth empowerment to bring to the table their interests, with the flexibility of developing their own curriculum and programming. Volunteers who plan on being with Conscious Impact for longer terms are strongly desired to work with us, as we value the importance of building stable relationships with our students and teachers over a dedicated period of time.

The Youth Outreach team throughout the season tries to facilitate workshops that focus on environmental awareness, sustainability, plant biology, and conservation. 

In the past, this has included teaching students how to build with cob, how to make bottle bricks out of recycled plastic, how to plant trees, as well as lessons around biodegradability, the greenhouse effect, the carbon cycle, and much more. 

We hope to continue providing this non-traditional curriculum for students in our area, whether by entering into government classrooms and collaborating with local teachers or inviting youth from our area into outdoor spaces where we can learn from one another through our values and love of the natural world. 

On a fateful day in early February 2017, a Teach for Nepal fellow working at the local Nawalpur Secondary School happened to meet a group of Conscious Impact volunteers. This inspired young educator shared her belief that it was of vital importance to create a safe space where young women could feel empowered, explore their creativity, boost their confidence, and share their experiences around their identity as Nepali women. Thus, the Girls Empowerment Program was born.

Through collaboration, this program has held workshops for young girls between 7th and 10th grade around poetry, yoga, trust and confidence building, drama/theatre, social entrepreneurship, and sexual reproductive health. During the off-season, the Girls Group even visited another school in the Terai region of Nepal to give a workshop on sexual reproductive health, using materials from the women's empowerment NGO Days for Girls.

In the future, we aim to expand our programming to other schools in our area, and continue supporting women of all ages to have a voice and to feel valued in their community. 

Our team has supported 3 local schools in our area by holding art classes, as well as painting murals and educational resources on the exterior and interior walls of classrooms. Thanks to the talented artist Laurie Tobia, we were able to paint murals at the Nawalpur Community Club room and the Siddartha Bimire Primary school. Through the help of a talented earth builder Yotam Machat, we created a playground structure out of old car tires and trash! 

Sharing art as an outlet of creativity is one of the easiest ways to connect with children and the local community at large. Throughout the year, we keep an eye out for opportunities for volunteers to engage and contribute through art or whatever talents they have to offer. If you are particularly interested in contributing in this way, please reach out or indicate on your volunteer interest form when you reach out to us!