CEO 

Jamie Dougherty is a passionate humanitarian and advocate for sustainable development. With a strong sense of justice and a powerful will to make a difference, Jamie has evolved from the role of school teacher to change-maker, helping impoverished communities around the globe to upgrade the quality of education, drinking water supply, gender equality and nutrition.

Jamie started by volunteering at the Home for Women, a safe heaven for sex traffic victims and rape victims in Thailand. She helped the home with counseling and empowerment programs like English class. Around the same time in Thailand, she involved 40 students from Ruamrudee International School who after raising enough funds, helped a local school in Northern Thailand install a drinking water supply system.

Jamie has been teaching for the last 12 years with experiences from three different continents. She started the ‘Nepal Project’ at the United Nations International School, New York, which has been ongoing for four years now involving over 200 students where they created and raise funds for meal programs in primary schools in Nepal and travel there once a year to visit the schools. In 2016 the Nepal Project raised over 100k dollars through various fundraising projects and grants. Under the leadership of Jamie, the money was used to rebuild a primary school that was destroyed in the 2015 Nepal earthquake.

Recently, she headed her second ‘Lanyard Project’ linking one of the most underprivileged groups of women from Nepal to the United Nations’ High Level Political Forum (Forum for Sustainability) as well as the United Nations’ Commission on the Status of Women Forum. The participants of both forums wore the lanyards for their ‘Name Tags’ and the Women’s Initiative was commended at the forum.

Jamie’s interest in furthering the cause of sustainable development takes her to interesting places across the globe that present themselves as important case studies for understanding the process of change. She is the co-founder of New Era World Model, which is under registration process as a Non Profit in the USA.

Programs Manager 

Bijen’s professional journey over the last 10 years has been spent as a film-maker and web developer. Having worked with the development organizations in Nepal, Bijen now designs, creates, and manages creative multimedia contents to enhance communications and promotional campaigns for desirable topics such as animal welfare, poverty, tourism and the environment. During 2015, his documentary that portrayed the aftermath of the devastating earthquake in Nepal helped raise funds to support the cause from international audiences.

As a business administration and media studies graduate, Bijen is able to integrate marketing and public relation skills for productive communications in his work. His love for travelling has enabled him to collect and share stories from different parts of Nepal through his individual projects. He wants to further his career in communications and management with the cause to support disadvantaged communities in different parts of Nepal.

Chief Financial Officer 

Bikash Basnet, Chief Financial Officer, has more than 5 years of experience in financial management and strategic support in commercial banks and development sectors. He holds a double master’s degree in Business Administration and Economics. After completion of his MBA from the University of Agder in Norway, he returned to Nepal and joined us. Besides working with us, his personal interest involves stock trading.

Board Member

Robert Smith entered Wall Street over 20 years ago with lessons passed down from four generations of family members who worked in the investment industry before him. Over the course of his career, he managed sales and trading teams at leading financial institutions, where he built a Fund Investor network and led in profitability at three firms. In 2014, Robert founded ICV to bring together his network of Family Offices and Fund Investors to evaluate opportunities that create a social impact beyond a financial return.

Robert serves on the Boards of the Chaeli Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on growing more inclusive and empowered communities, especially through the inclusion of children, youth and adults with disabilities; Childhood Cancer Kids, a nonprofit that increases childhood cancer awareness and elevates the spirits of children with cancer; the Children’s Village,  a nonprofit that works in partnership with families to help society’s most vulnerable children so that they become educationally proficient, economically productive, and socially responsible members of their communities; and, Tuesday’s Children, a response and recovery nonprofit organization that supports youth, families, and communities impacted by terrorism and traumatic loss.

Robert also serves on the Board of Directors of the Harmon Foundation, a private foundation established in 1922 by his great, great grandfather William E. Harmon for charitable and humanitarian purposes, with an emphasis on “inspirational and tangible help for young people.”