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I've been working with girls throughout the world for the past nine years, and my relationship and understanding of rural areas where girls are marginalized have shaped who I am today.

I co-founded Atoot to empower girls in Nepal through sports. It's really amazing to watch girls have daily opportunities, when earlier, they didn’t have any opportunities, were never able to leave home, and had never played sports. It does not mean that they’re going to be the next superstar. Rather, it’s about empowering them with opportunities that boys and men have all the time — a disparity that’s amplified in parts of the world where girls are valued even less.

When there is no existing ecosystem to build empowerment, we start by just opening up simple opportunities such as educational classes and daily football sessions, while showing them actual love and mentorship with our own employees at Atoot.

One of the rules we have at Atoot is that boys cannot join our program unless they bring three new girls with them. And those three girls have to remain daily — they can’t just bring them once and then stop. If boys want to be in our programming, they have to make sure that they are advocating for the girls around them, understanding the difficulties girls go through just to come to our programming, and the barriers they face to access any type of opportunity.

Through this, we are building an empowered ecosystem in the villages we are in, where we get to watch these young girls grow and fight for their own rights and fight for the rights of all the girls and the women in the villages around them.

The minute we give them a sustainable platform, they just run with it, and they forget what it's like to not have these types of platforms.

Growing empathy is a great way to gender equality and equity

At Atoot, we're always encouraging the boys around us to join — we want them to be a part of our programming because allyship is so important. Once you get the boys to understand how the girls in their communities have so many pushbacks, it creates more allyship and empathy, which the boys otherwise don't have because they've just always been put on a pedestal.

Growing empathy is a great way to gender equality and equity, and that can transfer over into the competitive leagues in making men understand and experience the setbacks and ridiculous restrictions that women athletes go through.

I hope that in the future, your gender doesn’t have an influence on whether you can play sport. If you're good enough, you're good enough. If you want to play on a certain team, it should not matter. Whether you want to play on a women's team or a men's team — everybody should be encouraging of that. And there should be no reason for these fights in the legal system.

In England, a lot of girls I know grew up playing in men’s teams, because they couldn't find a girls team. The families of the boys – mostly the fathers – would not like it, because the girls are beating them.

Who cares? Embrace it. It's not about being the best, it's about giving an outlet for so many and just championing one another.

Sport is a great divider in some settings but it's also a great bridge in so many others. And that's the type of sport that we always encourage and bring opportunities to. We don't bring sport to our girls to just do something, we bring it to teach values, to teach education, to teach life skills. Most importantly, we bring it to unite. Because what I want to see throughout the world is allyship.

Teaching others to respect not just each other, but oneself

The work at Atoot is exhausting and generally we don't get to decompress. My colleagues have grown up in societies where they’re expected to rigorously work six days a week and don’t have the space to think about their mental health.

I don't want to create a workplace where anybody feels like they cannot take a mental health break, vacation, or sick days. At Atoot, we are very rare in the sense that our colleagues have unlimited vacation time — they don’t have to worry about whether they’re menstruating or in pain. If they can’t come to work, it’s fine.

In August, I was back in Nepal for the SAFF women championships, which was amazing. We went up to Kathmandu, stayed with our founder, went to all the football matches and celebrated Atoot’s fourth anniversary. We’ve never had a chance to do something like that, because we’re always looking for funding and questioning whether we’re doing enough. We never sit back to take a look at what we have accomplished.

We had a whole week where we just celebrated everybody. We took all our staff and interns to different types of restaurants to experience foods they'd never eaten before — Arabic foods, Turkish foods, and so on. We just took care of everyone. It was great, and we're gonna do more of that.

Even during that time, I was saying we need to take more mental health breaks, and my co-founder said, “People think it is so weird that we do this.”

I said, “We appreciate, respect, and celebrate the Nepali culture. But we’re also here to make our own culture within our organization.”

The whole hope is again a development where you're teaching others to respect not just each other, but oneself. I see this as a normal thing, especially because I've suffered with anxiety disorders since I was 19, and preaching this is very important to me so that everyone normalizes it.

Funds go to big organizations that don't do sustainable work

Being a founder and 20,000-other-job holder title for Atoot means it's nonstop work because I have to remind myself that the organization doesn't continue the next year unless we have funding, which is the most difficult aspect of this work.

I took a bad mental health hit and it does affect me a lot. I will do anything to make sure this program continues because our colleagues and the girls and women in the community we work with, deserve something like this.

They're used to UNICEF and Save the Children coming into the community for one day and wasting $30,000 on something that's not even useful again, and then walking away and never talking to the community about whether it actually helps them. It's all a photo-op. And that also extends to businesses and CSRs. They don't give the money to the small players, because they just look for the thing that is going to give them the most PR.

I wish that wasn't the case because all the money and funding goes to these massive organizations that have huge PR budgets and don't do any grassroots long-term sustainable development.

I want that to change. That's what I've been pushing for the past five years — that this needs to change.

For those who have been lucky to grow up in a society, community or country that raises one another with opportunities, I would hope that we start realizing we have a lot of work to do.

Everybody can make the smallest-smallest trickle effect anywhere. You just have to take a step forward, find whatever space you are comfortable in, and make yourself an ally in whichever space that might be to help uplift others.

In my childhood, the genderization of sport wasn’t as relevant

I started playing sports when I was about three years old and played my entire life up until I was 15. I played all different sports including basketball, volleyball, and soccer. Back then, the genderization of sport was not as relevant. You didn’t have to worry about not being able to play the sport you love. At least for me, it was simply that I would play on the girls teams, which was not an issue.

We had all the opportunities and amenities – you could be a professional in whatever sport it was. While I appreciate that, it gets disappointing when you love so many different sports and want to play all of them. I played on a few different teams, depending on if it was a local team, elite team, state team or national team. The competitiveness and time commitments got quite heavy when I reached my teenage years.

My time wasn’t my own, and I missed out on a lot in my childhood. So I ended up quitting all my sports. But I always loved sport, and was always following it. It just wanted to stop playing, because it was no longer for my own enjoyment.

All the coaches were pushing me to play because of my natural athletic ability, which can be great. But if you don’t have the right mix with having a life, that can be really bothersome.

I would want my coaches to understand that you can't put the pressure on young kids, it's not fair. Let them discover their own way. The best is to advocate, reward, and highlight them for just the small little achievement. It doesn't have to be that they're the best, or that they're gonna go play for the national team.

It can be that they did a trick that they had not been able to do before. That is a huge achievement, and that's how we keep growing and empowering girls and women – by raising them up with whatever level they have.