We follow 10/17 United Nations sustainable development goals!

Please meet Laxmi Tamang! She is six years old and has been living at Lööf Foundation’s orphanage Home of Hope for more than a year. When she first arrived to Home of Hope she was introverted, shy and rarely smiled. Laxmi has developed a lot since moving into Home of Hope. With constant love, care and support from her housemother Asha, housefather Shyam, other Home of Hope children, and sponsor Nigel & Sonia Thompson, from Partex UK, Laxmi has been able to grow and develop into a vibrant and happy little girl!

This photo is one example of the many young lives we strive to impact positively. Upon reviewing the United Nations sustainable development goals, we are proud to say we actively partake in 10/17 of their goals. Many of the sustainable development goals presented by the United Nations is achievable over time if we all work together. It all starts with making a difference in one other person’s life.

Our work and projects we have engaged in around the world would not be possible without the amazing support and love received by many. Thank you to everyone who has donated or supported us in some way. We are truly grateful and sending you our warmest love 

Here are the 10 out of 17 UN’s sustainable development goals we, in the Lööf Foundation, support:

UN goal no 1 – End poverty in all its forms everywhere

Our project in Panaparum, India was aimed to bring the village out of extreme poverty over a three-year period. We achieved this goal by implementing different methods such as educating women, distributing microloans to women to start businesses, opening schools and kindergarten for children. We helped bring 17 children out of child labor and into school. Our goal was to educate and empower the mothers to work to provide an income to the household, rather than have the children work. We empowered the women by providing entrepreneurship training so that the women could open enterprises involving cows, five goats or a pedal sewing machine. These commodities would allow the women to gain an income from the businesses they started. We provided them with education in borrowing and lending money, counting, reading and managing economic issues.

UN goal no 2 – End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture

Through several of our projects we have helped towards the goal of ending hunger, promoting sustainable agriculture and food security. Our project Home of Hope in Nepal which is an orphanage for the children of Ratankot, we have built a greenhouse and chicken house. We have introduced new kinds of seeds for them to grow, and even given them new recipes to try to promote healthy eating. Our chicken house was designed to promote a sustainable source of protein for the children through eggs and meat.

In our project in Panapuram, India, we helped to establish kitchen gardens and clean up waste to provide and secure the villagers with a healthy source of food. We helped build 12 bio-gas toilets to promote better hygiene and improve the quality of foods grown, as the villagers wouldn’t have to excrete in the fields where they grow their foods.

We have helped support and donate to many projects that seek to feed people such as the organization Tafel Kirchheim in Germany that is a grocery shop for low income people and families. Helping Hands of Devonport that helps to provide the homeless of Auckland, New Zealand with healthy home cooked meals, and Elmhurst-Yorkfield Food pantry in the Chicago suburbs that helps feed 400 families each month who struggle financially.

UN goal no 3 – Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages

During our trips to Home of Hope in Nepal, we have brought along a volunteer nurse on two trips to help educate the Home of Hope children, village school children and surrounding villagers on how to administer basic health practices, prevention of sickness, hygiene routines and have administered two women’s meeting within the village. We have felt it important to donate medical supplies to the health clinic of Ratankot regularly and providing medical care when needed from a military trained volunteer and volunteer nurse. At the school of Ratankot we have given a workshop on nutrition and the importance healthy foods have on individual’s overall health.

Within our project at Panapuram, India we focused on improving the health of the villagers. In the three-year period of our project we helped treat hundreds of people, given pediatrician care to 105 children, and provided five medical camps. More importantly over a thousand people had been trained in hygiene and health. We helped to build 25 toilets, 12 of them being bio-gas toilets. This would help with better sanitation, hygiene and safety as many women would use the bathroom at night in the dark.
With support and partnership with Star for Life, it has been possible to educate the Folweni high school students in South Africa how to protect against HIV/AIDS and give students access to a mobile health clinic.

In Sweden, we promoted a healthy physical lifestyle to those living in the community of Gullspång by sponsoring them with a zipline in their central park.

UN goal no 4 – Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all

At Home of Hope we equally encourage all our children to study, engage and do their best at school. Once the children are at graduating level, we give each child the opportunity to attend further schooling in their respective fields.

In Sweden, the Lööf Foundation Academy supported young unemployed people by holding a series of free knowledge-building seminars. The aim was to empower young people to create the life they want, and give them the lifelong tools they would need to lead successful lives. Also in Sweden, a communicator/coach/conflict handler from Stockholm spent 10 days providing students and teachers with tools in communication and conflict management. The training was aimed to improve mental health, increase motivation to study and aid participants in living a meaningful life.

We paired with the organization Star for Life in South Africa at Folweni Highschool for a three-year period to help teach all students their sense of worth, enhance self-esteem, a belief that their dreams can come true, and education in sexual health and how to protect against the spread of HIV/AIDS.

UN goal no 5 – Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls

In any of our projects where we help support children and youth, we seek to empower all girls and women. In supporting Folweni Highschool in South Africa, we have encouraged that all girls in that school are just as capable of fulfilling and pursuing their dreams as anyone else.

At Home of Hope in Nepal we make sure our housemother and housefather encourage and spread equality amongst all children, despite gender. One way is by handing out household chores to each child equally and not making an excuse that one chore cannot be done by a child simply because of their gender. As well, at the local school in the village we held a workshop for all students to teach them about gender equality. Our long-term goal is that the new generation in the village will grow up with a new knowledge of gender equality and pass this knowledge to the next generation.

In South Africa, we helped support a young woman in her secondary education by giving her a sponsorship to school. Through our project in India we explicitly focused on giving out microloans to women, women entrepreneurship, education for women, and training in specific skills for women to pursue a business.

UN goal no 6 – Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all

We feel everyone should have access to clean drinking water and live in a sanitary environment. This is why during out project in India, we felt it important to deploy two water tanks and water cleaning units within the schools. Bio-gas toilets were built to sustainably provide better sanitation and hygiene for the villagers. In Home of Hope in Nepal, a water line is connected to the house to provide clean drinking water for all that live there. Within the home, toilets with a septic system were built to allow for better sanitation within the house.

UN goal no 8 – Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all

Running the orphanage Home of Hope in Nepal requires employed staff to care for the children. We have two competent and caring providers employed full time to run the orphanage. They were local from the village, and through our support, we are able to provide them with a full-time wage. Their relief person is also from the surrounding village, which we provide pay for her work in taking care of the children when the housemother and housefather take holiday. Through building Home of Hope and continuously engaging in new projects in correlation to Home of Hope, we offer and provide many villagers seasonal employment. In turn, this creates economic growth within the village by introducing new jobs and income for those living in the village.

At our project in Panapuram, India, we wanted to give entrepreneurship training to the women so they could start their own businesses. We educated the women first in reading, counting, money management, and gave experience in saving, lending and borrowing money through self-help groups. Once the women completed this education, we distributed 158 microloans which would provide a cow, five goats or a pedal sewing machine. Additional education in tailoring, saree manufacturing, cooking, pickle making, and pappad making were administered to the women so they could start their own business.

UN goal no 9 – Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation

By building Home of Hope in Nepal, which is a country accustomed to earthquakes, it was imperative that we build Home of Hope to be resilient against any future earthquakes. This is why we have built the house using rebars, and constructed it to hold against the elements of Nepal. The chicken house beside Home of Hope has also been constructed using rebars.

At our project in Panapuram, India we helped to build 25 toilets in the village. Of these toilets 12 were bio-gas toilets. These are the first toilets installed in the Tamilnadu region. Our hope is that the bio-gas toilets would be sustainable, resilient and foster innovation for other people in the region.

UN goal no 10 – Reduce inequality within and among countries

The caste system is still present within Nepal, however in our project Home of Hope, it does not hold the same value amongst our children and their housemother and housefather. We make it imperative that the children being raised in our orphanage look at others and treat others as equals, despite the different backgrounds they come from. We also promote gender equality as a core principle in the orphanage. Our housemother and housefather promote and instill that everyone who enters the doors to Home of Hope is welcome, no matter their caste system, age, gender, skin color, race, ethnicity or culture.
This same principle is held with our project at Folweni Highschool. Everyone is welcome to learn and be a student despite their health conditions, skin color, gender or if they are HIV positive.

We have many different people who volunteer with us, which promotes equality and an exposure for different countries to work with and engage with all types of people they may never have had access to.

UN goal no 11 – Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable

Through our projects in Nepal and India where we have worked amongst and with whole villages, our goal has been to include everyone, make them feel safe and sustainable. With Panapuram, we wanted to give the village the tools and education to be self-sustainable once we had left. This is why we helped to open schools, provided workshops, support groups and education. This goes for Home of Hope in Nepal as well, we provided them with the infrastructure and means to effectively run the orphanage while at the same time give guidance, direction and make continuous visits to check on their progress.