A birthday celebration!

‍

Last week marked Lily's Leaves second birthday and there was good cause for celebration at the Lily's Leaves training and production centre in Kathmandu. For Lily, Meena and their team have successfully navigated two years of the most daunting challenges, including coming through the operational restrictions placed upon them by COVID.

‍

‍

Lily's Leaves activities in Kathmandu

‍

To remind you, the Lily's Leaves social enterprise provides training to vulnerable young women from within Kathmandu valley but primarily from Madhesh Province in southeast Nepal. There are currently two main elements to the initiative:

‍

‍

The first is a silver jewellery workshop that offers employment to four young deaf women - deaf people are highly stigmatised in Nepal and struggle to find employment. They operate under the close supervision of volunteer silversmiths sourced by our U.S. partner non-profit, Her Future Coalition.

The skill levels that the women have attained is quite remarkable and products are now available to wholesale buyers around the world. Lily's Leaves jewellery has been sold as far afield as the USA and Singapore.

In the UK, one of the customers is the Gurkha Museum in Winchester which has products on display at the Museum shop and available for purchase through its website and catalogue - including their Christmas catalogue. Hint, hint. And jewellery will be on sale at the Soroptimist annual conference in Belfast at the end of this month.

‍

The second main element is what could be broadly described as tailoring products. Trainees have the option of attending a six-months-long basic tailoring course that is residential in Kathmandu for women who join from south Nepal. After that, they have the option of returning home with a gifted sewing machine that will allow them to earn money from offering their services to their local community on an individual basis.

Alternatively, they can proceed onto a six-month-long advanced tailoring course that would give them the skills to work in a factory or production centre environment, earning good salaries. The training is embedded within Lily's Leaves own production centre where the workforce produces a range of items that include branded bags and purses, facemasks, dignity pads (reusable sanitary pads) and school rucksacks. The market for these products is building slowly, but steadily, with a view to the profits from sales (including jewellery) covering the Lily's Leaves operating costs and generating a profit that can fund the Lily's Leaves social programme.

‍

‍

‍

The Lily's Leaves social programme in Madhesh Province

‍

‍

The social programme is directed at the poorest community schools in Madhesh Province - and it's already underway! Lily personally visits schools to distribute "free" school rucksacks and dignity pads to encourage attendance. Preventing girls from dropping out of school when they reach puberty reduces the prevalence of child marriage, a scourge that is endemic in that part of Nepal. During those visits, Lily takes the opportunity to speak to girls about menstrual health. She also speaks to boys about the need to respect girls and their privacy while they are having their periods. This open-ended programme has been very well received by the schools and has to continue into the future.

‍

‍

Plans for 2023

‍

Pipal Tree and its partners needs to continue to fund Lily's Leaves through regular grant funding until it can become self-sustaining through sales. That is probably going to require a further five years of subsidies, but this tantalising goal is certainly achievable. At the same time, from January we are planning to open a satellite tailoring training and production centre in Sarlahi District, one of Madhesh Province's eight Districts. This will be used for the training and employment of women from the District, rather than having to bring them to Kathmandu. That will both reduce overheads (negating the need for residential training in expensive Kathmandu) and allow trainees to be taught in their own language. In this part of Nepal women speak Maithili rather than Nepali as their first language. Over the past two years we have been training the trainers in at Lily's Leaves in Kathmandu, so this rustication will provide a tremendous opportunity for Maithili-speaking women to share their skills.

‍

‍

‍

The Big Give Christmas Challenge

‍

This year's Big Give Christmas Challenge will launch on the 29th November and run until Christmas Eve. Our aim is to raise the £150,000 that we need to bring our plans to fruition. During the appeal period, all donations made online will automatically double in value through matching pledges that we are putting in place beforehand. The appeal target sounds ambitious in these very tough times, but in fact we already have £52,750 in place towards our £75,000 pledge target! We are optimistic of reaching our pledge target by the end of this month. Then it's over to you!

‍

‍

How you can help

‍

Our aim is to hit the ground running when the appeal goes live at noon on the 29th November, so, if you would like me to send you a reminder, just mail me and I will make a note of your interest and email address. Do please think of how you might interest an organisation that you are involved with in supporting us too - this could be, for example, a school, club, church or a company. We can only hit our appeal target if we aim off in advance and have our networks primed for when the appeal goes live.

Finally, we will be holding a fundraising dinner at the exclusive Victory Services Club in London on the evening of the 29th November. If you are in the area and would like to be added to the attendance list, again, just email me and we can discuss possibilities. Obviously, attendees would need to be prepared to make a major contribution towards our fundraising target and the associated campaign.

To find out more about the Big Give Christmas Challenge, follow this link.

‍