Palisadian Involved with Nepal Documentary; Funding Sought

Patty Breech, who graduated from Palisades High School in 2002 and then Yale, moved to Nepal in 2014 and now works with Maggie Doyne and the BlinkNow Foundation at a children’s home/school in western Nepal.

Breech, who grew up in the Palisades, sent the News a Feb. 23 email asking, “My organization in Nepal is making a documentary following the story of Maggie and her kids, and we’ve started a Kickstarter fund to raise money for it.”

Doyne founded the Kopila Valley Children’s Home and School in Nepal. At age 19, on a gap year, she witnessed how the children were being impacted in war-torn Nepal and decided to use her savings (mostly babysitting money) to build a home for orphaned and at-risk children. In 2010, she opened her first school for 350 of the remote region’s most impoverished children.

Doyne nursed a malnourished two-month-old baby boy to health in 2014, and he became her “son.” In 2015, she was voted CNN’s Hero of the Year, but on Dec. 30 that year, a tragic accident claimed the little boy’s life.

Retreating to New Jersey for two months, Doyne ultimately met filmmaker Jeremy Power Regimbal, who had won a nomination for the Young Directors Award at the 2015 Cannes Lion Festival. They immediately bonded when they discovered they shared the point of view that “focusing on raising the children of the world is how we can change our future.”