Dream Catchers Scholarships Monthly Meeting - Bringing girls together

Introductions of new friends

I love our monthly Dream Catchers Meetings. The energy of having the girls together and sharing their stories, dramas, learnings, always inspires me. This month’s meeting was extra special for several reasons. 

Generally, we hold 2 separate meetings – one for our Kathmandu Dream Catchers (college scholarships) and one for our Bhaktapur, Panauti and Sanga group. Each month, we cover a different theme – leadership, cheer squads of support, cybercrime and online safely have been our recent topics. The girls prepare and lead the meetings. This month we decided to do something different. We combined both groups of girls for a total of around 50 and held our meeting at Riviera, our model school. It was great to see the 2 groups getting to know each other and expanding their support networks. 



Sorting values, projects and team details

The topic was Mitrataa. The girls decided that they needed to improve their knowledge of Mitrataa’s values, history and activities. We explored Mitrataa’s beginnings in 2000, our projects along the way which gave the girls an opportunity to share their experiences with Mitrataa since they have all come to this group through different projects and journeys – the Project Snow Leopard photography group, the Riviera group, the Passion for Life group, Rabindra’s group, the ex-Bal Mandir group. We then discussed Mitrataa’s Values and our Dream Recipe which underpins all of the work we do.
For me, it was the first monthly meeting I have attended since returning to Nepal so I loved catching up with all the girls, seeing how much they have grown over the last few months. Sharing more of Mitrataa’s history with the girls was also an opportunity to celebrate their progress over the last several years. We celebrated Sangita who was one of our first scholarship girls under our new programs in 2007. Back then, she was a shy class 6 student. Now she is a very confident class 12 Travel and Tourism student with big dreams. We celebrated the Passion for Life girls who were in our first batch of Dream Centre girls in Baneshwor and are now in class 11 at Texas College. We celebrated Ashmita’s progress from government school in Panauti to top of her class in class 9 at an English medium school. 



Sangita sharing her journey with Mitrataa

Each girl has an amazing story. Knowing that Mitrataa has played a small role in their stories and their confidence gave me a very warm fuzzy feeling. I am really proud of them and grateful for the opportunity to be a part of their lives. Every single one of them is amazing and I can’t wait to see where their dreams take them.


Ashmita - first in her class in class 9