About Us

It has been a long road getting here. A long, winding, difficult but immensely beautiful road.  Does this bring to mind the path through a mountain? Or undulating hills? We took our inspiration from the children who walk to school in the foothills of the Himalayas, a metaphor for the long, needful  road to education, even if you live on the edges of a country, on the fringes of society, away from the centre. We watched them laugh and talk and realised a few things: the need to know, the drive to learn, the love of friendship, the wholeness of community is the greatest assurance against desolation, despondency and disadvantage.  We also learned that it is worthwhile to preserve all of these.  The Mountain Children’s Foundation was born in India 21 years ago (Mountain Children’s Foundation website (opens in a new tab)).   Headed by the indomitable Aditi Kaur, the MCF has been educating the children of the Himalayas, bridging the rural-urban gaps faced by most mountain communities, being an environmental disaster relief organisation when needed, providing child protection services, understanding and facilitating children’s rights, helping kids clean up their communities, spreading joy through play, discovery, art and connection in all ways.  But more than anything else, the MCF India has beaten out a singular path: protect, preserve and enhance the innate joy, courage and curiosity of a child, build on their strong humanity, and they will thrive in the face of all kinds of obstacles. 

And something else happens too: when a person is secure within themselves, when they are taken care of, they take care of others too.  When a child thrives, their communities thrive, and the future holds more promise, more options, more hope.  

All this, of course, takes hard work and consistent effort and the MCF has survived for 21 years, a fixture now, in the minds of the mountain children of the Himalayas. 

It’s a strange thing, but an idea began to grow among a small group of connected people. We find ourselves scattered across the world, living and working  globally, but the mountain children never leave us. And we find ourselves united by a passion for learning, for the promise implicit in the world’s children, and the love of connections across cultures, regions, and knowledge systems.  With the vision and the work of the MCF in our sights, we began to wonder, what if the mountain children of the word were connected? What if they reached out to each other, shared their lives, their hopes, the wisdom of their ancestors? What if they solved their challenges together? What if all this helped with feelings of dislocation, remoteness, sometimes isolation? What stories would they tell?This is us, then, The Mountain Children’s Forum.