Our Mission

Umbrella has focused on rescuing, housing, and educating trafficked and destitute children. The current capacity is 325 children, living in 8 houses. Now that the civil war is over, Umbrella can focus on reuniting the children with their families when conditions permit or, when reunification is not possible, providing them the education and vocational skills they need to ensure they can find gainful employment when they become adults. By focusing on this latter stage of the cycle now, we can endeavour to restart the cycle and rescue more conflict-displaced children, whose number is now estimated at 30,000.

Umbrella's goal is to develop the child in all aspects of their education and life. There is no end point to this development and we will continue to work with the Umbrella children until they are confident and equipped to step out into the world on their own two feet and become contributing adults.

The first objective is to have all children pass their School Leaving Certificate (SLC), giving them a solid academic foundation. Then they will join our Next Steps Program, this programme was designed for our teenagers, to help them evolve towards professional life. The programme will teach them life skills, and help them choose the right path for them. When students excel in their academic studies Umbrella will offer scholarships to pursue further education but due to UFN's financial constraints, most of the children will not have the chance to go to college, so UFN need to ready them for employment after SLC. This is a challenge for most Nepali youths, even for qualified candidates, as the country has a high unemployment rate, this coupled with the culture of nepotism and family businesses puts UFN children at an automatic disadvantage.

The Umbrella Foundation, along with a French partner organisation, SolHimal is also working to develop the communities of Gurje which is located 20km North of Kathmandu. It is our plan to move 220 Umbrella children to Gurje in the next two years. Before the move we are working with the local people to develop their communities with projects such as:

• School renovations
• Building of a health post
• Food for Education (FFE) programme in 5 schools
• Agricultural training
• Seed distrbution
• Literacy classes for the women's groups
• Income generating activity workshops for the women's groups
  

Providing alternative sources of energy, green energy; biogas units will fuel the FFE programme, solar panels light the schools and the women's literacy classes, hydro electricity will generate the electricity for the health post.

SolHimal-Umbrella are working with the Nepali government towards their plan to build a new school for 500 students (250 SUON children and 250 local children). Land has been donated from the Nepali government and the construction has been donated from the Indian Government.