Sustainability

At Kopila Valley, sustainability isn’t just something we talk about now and again—it’s at the heart of everything we do. We understand how critical it is that all of us learn how to live our lives in a way that cares for our community and the environment we all share. Our young people—like young people all around the world—are leading the way and providing a model for how institutions and organizations can use smart thinking and cutting edge design to build a healthier, more sustainable future.

The Greenest School in Nepal

In 2019, BlinkNow opened our new green campus for the Kopila Valley School. The campus not only provides new facilities for our students and teachers, it is also  a model of sustainable architecture and green design.

The school’s rammed earth walls and carefully placed doors, windows, and terraces allow the building to stay cool in the summer and warm in the winter without an active heating or cooling system. Solar panels generate enough electricity to power the school, and a solar cooking system uses the sun’s heat to cook the rice and lentils we eat every day. Rain that falls on our school during the monsoon season is collected and filtered to provide drinking water all year long. We also recycle our water after using it, filtering and purifying it again so it can safely be put to work irrigating our plants before it leaves our campus!

Learn More About Our Green Campus ›

We are what we eat! (And it’s sustainable!)

We also know that one of the most dramatic ways people impact the environment is by what they eat! Students at Kopila Valley get a hands-on education in where our food comes from—including the kind of impact our diet has on the environment.

We maintain a large garden that supplies healthy, organic fruits and vegetables to our school lunch program, which serves over 400 hot meals each day, and we compost what isn’t used. We also source rice (we cook A LOT of rice every day) from nearby farms. Our students even operate an aquaponics system that allows us to raise fish and plants together in a closed-loop ecosystem in which the fish provide fertilizer for the plants and the plants filter the water for the fish!

Education

At BlinkNow, of course, we don’t just want to create a green school—we want to empower our students to be sustainability leaders for years to come! That means sustainability, just like gender equality and economic empowerment, it something we talk about all year long. Caring for the environment is a part of every student’s curriculum. We make sure our teachers have professional development opportunities so they can help guide our students’ growth, including the opportunity to participate in “permaculture training” to learn more about Surkhet’s own ecosystem.