Introduction
I am a pursing my Ph.D. in Child and Youth Studies at Brock University. My specialization entails Youth Community Engagement, Citizen’s Engagement and Advocacy, Development Leadership, and Participatory Action Research (PAR) involving youth. As an academic researcher, my doctoral research and my teaching experience have focused extensively on youth social and political engagement in community development. My doctoral research examined the youth community engagement in the post-disaster context of Nepal. This research focuses on young people’s spontaneous community engagement during and after the disaster.
I strongly believe in transforming knowledge into action, therefore, I tried to incorporate my learnings into practice by creating multiple community-based projects for vulnerable groups mainly for People Who Use Drugs (PWUD) and People who Live with HIV/AIDS (PLHIV/AIDS) of Nepal or visible minority youth of Canada. The most crucial project, thus far, has been PWUD and PLHIV led early Tuberculosis diagnosis among PWUD and PLHIV/AIDS clients in ten highly affected areas of Nepal. Upon completion of this project, I helped to establish a recovery center for PWUD in Nepal which still offers inpatient and outpatient programs to PWUD at reasonable cost. After migrating to Canada, I have been involved in a non-profit organization- Canadian Newa Guthi (CNG)- to design and implement various projects that would help the newcomers in their settlement process. Since my involvement in CNG, I have written a few grant winning proposals for Nepalese diaspora community here in Canada. Among them, Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration granted a projected named “Bridging Nepalese Canadian Youth with Newly Arrived Nepalese Immigrants Project” in 2016, which allowed young Nepalis Canadians to involve in this project for sharing their lived experience and knowledge with other newcomers in Canada.