By Rachel Konieczny
News Assignment Editor
Even though Maggie Doyne, the 2015 CNN Hero of the Year, didn’t receive a college education, that didn’t stop her from creating a school for 160 Nepalese children.
Doyne, who will receive an honorary degree from St. Bonaventure University on Monday, said she took a gap year after high school to take a break from the pressures of higher education and instead enrolled in a service program that took her to many countries, including Nepal.
“I was working with Nepalese refugees as a result of the civil war that was happening northeast over the border,” Doyne said. “I got really curious about Nepal and wanted to know all that’s going on there. I was working with lots of children and families and became really close to a lot of them.”
Doyne said she disliked orphanages, deciding to create a loving place for the Nepalese children to grow up and create their own families.
To accomplish this goal, Doyne asked her parents to wire her $5,000—her babysitting money from past summers.
“It didn’t happen overnight, but they really listened and believed in me and at the end of the day, it just felt like it was my money,” Doyne said. “They really trusted me to make that decision.”
After Doyne bought land and built the Kopila Valley Children’s Home, she heard from a supporter from her hometown in New Jersey.
Eileen Quick, a St. Bonaventure philanthropist and the wife of ’75 alumnus Leslie C. Quick III, said she contacted Doyne in 2010 about supporting her mission. Quick joined Doyne’s BlinkNow Foundation, an organization that assists the children and women of Kopila Valley, and became a board member in 2011.
“It was when I heard about the project that she already started in Nepal—in our local paper—I reached out to her because I was very interested in the work she was doing,” Quick said. “We had lunch and talked about it, and then I decided to spread the word and invite some of our friends to have dinner at our home. I invited Maggie to come and speak, and it kind of took off from there.”
Quick said she saw Doyne’s work firsthand when Doyne contacted her in early September 2014 and asked for a favor.
Doyne had previously taken care of Robbie, a malnourished Nepalese baby, and needed Quick, whom she knew loved children and had international travel experience, to take him to his follow-up medical appointments in Kathmandu before taking him back to Kopila Valley. Quick said Doyne was in the U.S. at the time.
“That was my first trip [to Nepal],” Quick said. “I didn’t have a lot of time to plan it. We left within a week—we just kind of went. It was a wonderful trip. Nepal is one of the poorest countries I’ve ever been to, but the people are beautiful and welcoming.”
In addition to the school, Doyne also created a women’s center and children’s home in Nepal, for which she won the CNN award on Nov. 17 out of nine other heroes. Doyne said, with a laugh, that her most memorable moment of the night was hugging Anderson Cooper, the ceremony’s host.
“I was humbled to be amongst all of those other amazing heroes and their projects and their causes,” Doyne said. “I was proud that I could represent Nepal in that way, and I think my generation, being a young person. I was proud that I could just be a face and have the opportunity to inspire other people to make the world a little bit better, because I am so normal.”
Doyne said she plans to use the $110,000 awarded to her to build an expanded school and vocational center in Nepal.
Quick praised Doyne’s dedication to her foundation.
“Maggie’s the real deal,” Quick said. “She’s really dedicated her life to improving the lives of women and children in her remote region of Nepal. Everything she does is with the purest of intentions and the utmost of compassion, grace and love. She’s humble; she’s dedicated to her mission, and I’m just very proud to be a part of it.”
Doyne said learning she would receive an honorary degree from Bonaventure was emotional and gratifying.
“This was just validating,” Doyne said. “It felt like recognizing that even though I didn’t go to college, my education didn’t stop and that’s always been my message. I never stopped learning once I left school and got out to the world. If anything, I started learning.”
Bonaventure will award Doyne her degree Monday at 4 p.m. in the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts.
koniecrc14@bonaventure.edu
