Sustainable Businesses and Farming

Part of our role is to share experience and ideas with the families in our community on how to turn the skills they have into a sustainable source of income.

We are always keen for our families and communities to become independent and so if they develop a sound business plan (sometimes with our support, other times on their own initiative), we do our best to help them get the skills and capital to start the businesses. We have had several families do that including tailoring businesses, chicken farming and mushroom farming.

We also working with communities to help establish sustainable cooperatives and businesses together, resulting in a very success organic farming program in Anaikot which continues to expand and support more families and learning.

The families work together to share their experience and ideas and we have been working with some permaculture experts to give us ideas on organic, natural ideas. As we are working directly with the farmers, we have been able to cut out about 3 levels of middlemen and so we have paid the farmers the rate the middlemen get. Farm fresh spinach and coriander for our families in Kathmandu, extra money for our farming partners – happy teams all round. In fact, the demand for their products has been so high that often we miss out! We also added some fruit trees which help with water retention as our villages had been facing water shortages after the water table moved following the earthquakes in 2015. One of our farmers attended 3 days of organic farming training and was keen to try this out with some fruit farming. The families in this cooperative have also been supporting each other in different ways such as reconstruction of their homes which they all lost during the quakes. The community spirit and sharing of ideas, time, expertise and support between the families has been fantastic.