Meet The Founder: Zara Balfour from Snowland Journeys
As part of our series showcasing our amazing non-profit and impact startup community, we chatted to Zara Balfour, founder of Snowland Journeys. Snowland Journeys is a non-profit organisation which facilitates the reintegration of Himalayan children, helps maintain contact with their families, alongside their right to education.
Zara Balfour
Hi Zara, did you always have the ambition to start a non-profit organisation?
I've always wanted to do good in the world and make a positive change. Ever since I was a child, I've always felt that people have a duty to try and make the world a better place, and I've always felt happiest when I'm doing something that I feel makes a difference and has meaning. However, starting a non-profit organisation wasn't my plan and it took me by surprise.
What inspired you to start Snowland Journeys in Nepal specifically?
I found out that children who are born in the High Himalayas of Nepal have to be sent away from their families if they're to get an education. Due to the remoteness of the villages they come from, they're out of contact with their families for 12 years. I made a feature documentary, called 'Children of the Snow Land', which follows three young people returning home, aged 16, to parents they haven't seen since they were just four years old. At the time, a small charity was paying for their 'going home' journeys, but in the six years it took to make the film, they gradually lost resources until the point where they were no longer able to support the children to return home. The journey is far too expensive for the children to afford alone and without support, they'd never be able to see their families in the mountains again. I'd gotten to care greatly for the children by that point and couldn't bear the thought that younger generations wouldn't ever have the chance to go home.
We started fundraising via film audiences, but I wanted to do something to ensure long term sustainability of the going home journeys, and also to help solve other issues that these children and their families face. Around the same time, I met my co-director Phil Briggs, who immediately fell in love with the film and was compelled to join me and help the children. Phil is an outdoor learning and expedition expert, with experience of working with marginalised young people, so he was the perfect partner. Together, he and I developed Snowland Journeys, along with our beneficiaries, to ensure everything we do is needs-led by the community to make the most impact where it's most needed.
In what way do you think Snowland Journeys will change the High Himalayas?
Our ultimate aim with Snowland Journeys is to develop sustainable livelihoods in the Himalayan regions of Dolpo and Humla - the poorest and most remote regions of Nepal - so that in future families won't have to be separated for education. At the moment, communication, sanitation and transportation are not good enough for teachers to want to live there, so we hope that by building livelihoods we can change that.
The first step towards that goal is making sure that the children sent away for education get to return home and reintegrate with their families, communities and culture. The children often feel unloved and it's only by going home that they realise why they were sent away and that they're deeply loved by their parents. We've developed our Reintegration Programme to work with both children and their families in the years leading up to their return home, to ensure they have emotional support and preparation, outdoor personal and social development and physical preparation, as well as expedition and social work support on their long journeys home. It's a momentous occasion and a huge physical and emotional challenge for the children and for their parents, who have to learn how to welcome back a child who's used to city life. If done successfully, this trip will create a life long bond. One student has just graduated medical school and plans to move back to Dolpo, where he will be the first-ever doctor in the whole region. So education is not only a way out, it can also be a way back.
To enable villagers to develop livelihoods, we run regenerative trekking expeditions, where we take small groups of trekkers to these undiscovered, off-grid regions. We've just launched a virtual trekking - vrekking - challenge which aims to raise funds for our Reintegration Programme.
At present they live a subsistence lifestyle without income, so we're also in the process of developing programmes to help them to establish arts and crafts businesses, as well as improving agricultural and conservation projects to enable sustainable income generation.
What are the biggest challenges facing you and Snowland Journeys
Our biggest challenges are lack of time, people and funding. The need in the communities we support is so great and we can clearly see a path to enabling Himalayan people, but we're a small team and we're always pulled in a million different directions. More volunteers and more corporate partners could help us overcome these challenges and make a much bigger impact. We can do a lot in the High Himalayas for a comparably small amount of money and we hope that we will continue to grow, although Covid has made our work harder, and also impacted the lives of the people we support.
Where do you see Snowland Journeys in the future?
In future we'd like Snowland Journeys to support the children of all schools which educate students far from home - there are 25 such schools in the Kathmandu valley alone. In the long term, we'd like to improve village conditions to the point where children can be educated closer to home and have much more family contact during their schooling. It's heartbreaking that it's a binary choice between education and family for people of the High Himalayas. Imagine not seeing your child for 12 years - a whole childhood from age 4 until age 16 spent away from home! It's a huge sacrifice for both the parents and the children and we hope to change that. We're also planning to bring 'life lessons from Nepal' to young people in the UK. Covid has meant that we're all experiencing restrictions on our lives and many people are suffering mental health challenges as a result. The young people we support in Nepal spend many years inside their school building due to lack of funds to get them outdoors. And yet they emerge as teenagers full of resilience, hope and determination to make the most of life, no matter how limited. Impressive life lessons that we have been studying with them for many years and are now developing as resources for young people in the UK to help them better cope with Covid-related restrictions.
If you would like to learn more about Snowland Journeys, volunteer for any of their projects or discover more about how you and your company can work with and help amazing founders, non-profits and impact organisations like this one, you can find out more here or get in touch.
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