Maggie Doyne, Tope Malla, and the Kopila Valley Partnership in Nepal

In 2005, after finishing high school in New Jersey, Maggie Doyne set off to travel with little more than a backpack. In India she volunteered at Ramana's Garden, a children's home, and there she first met and worked alongside Tope Malla, a Nepali man who would become her partner in everything that followed.

In 2006 she traveled into Nepal with a friend and reached Surkhet, a district in the western part of the country.

In Surkhet she met a seven-year-old girl named Hima who was breaking stones in a dry riverbed to earn money for her family. Doyne began paying for Hima to go to school.

Then she helped a few more children, and then a few more. The organization's own history describes the start that way: not a grand plan, but one child, followed by the next.

In 2007 Doyne and Tope Malla set up a Nepali nongovernmental organization with its own board, and BlinkNow was incorporated in the United States to raise support. That June they broke ground on the Kopila Valley Children's Home, using Doyne's life savings of about $5,000, money she had earned babysitting. Kopila means flower bud.

The home took in its first child in 2008 and, after award funding came in, grew to about 30 children by 2009.

Doyne later said that if someone had told her at 18 that she would become a mother figure to some 50 children, she would have called it crazy. She was learning as she went, and she depended heavily on Malla and Nepali staff who understood the community, the language, and the local systems.

The work widened. Kopila Valley School opened in 2010 in bamboo buildings. A clinic followed in 2011 and a Women's Empowerment Center in 2013. In 2015, at 28, Doyne was named CNN Hero of the Year, bringing a $100,000 grant to BlinkNow. By then the home cared for about 50 children and the school taught nearly 400 students.

The attention also brought criticism. In 2018 the group No White Saviors published an open letter arguing that media coverage cast a young American with no professional training as the hero while overlooking Nepali staff, and that children's homes can separate children from families who could care for them with support. BlinkNow responded publicly. It said it focuses on keeping families together, admits children to residential care only after assessment, supports reunification when possible, and that Tope Malla, as co-founder and equal partner, deserved far more credit than the press had given him. Doyne committed to lifting up the Nepali team's voices.

Today BlinkNow describes Tope Malla as leading the team of caregivers who run daily operations. Most of its programs, including the school and the women's center, aim to strengthen families so children can stay with them. In 2025 the organization opened the Kopila Valley Children's Village, with modular homes for the children in its care.

The story is less about one young American than about a long partnership, local leadership, and an organization willing to learn from its critics.