Name: Nicky Deasy
Location: Mill Street
Occupation: Director, Irish Nepalese Children’s Foundation
Worst thing about Galway: It is getting a little bit commercialised
Favourite thing about Galway: The people and the craic.
Not many people would give up a high powered, well-paid job in business to spend ten months of the year sleeping in a mud hut. Nicky Deasy gave up her career in corporate strategy to set up her own charity helping children in Nepal.
Nicky grew up in Dublin and had always had her heart set on a career in business. After graduating first in her class in BESS from Trinity College, she joined KPMG Corporate Finance in Dublin, where she trained as a Chartered Accountant.
However, after working there for seven years, Nicky felt that the city was becoming increasingly materialistic and had lost its community spirit. So in 2002, she relocated to Galway, where she set up a corporate finance practice for the West of Ireland with global accountancy firm Ernst & Young.
Nicky settled in immediately and says she found people in Galway a lot friendlier than those in Dublin.
“On any night in Galway you can just turn around and have a conversation with whoever happens to be beside you, just for the craic without any agenda. In Dublin, people would be looking at you thinking ‘what do you want?’ The whole city is really laid back and I loved that.”
While Nicky had fallen in love with Galway, she still wasn't sure if she was on the right path in life. Despite enjoying her role, she felt that she was working to “make rich people richer”. Having worked with Saint Vincent de Paul over the years, charity work was something that Nicky enjoyed and in September 2006, she handed in her notice at Ernst and Young and decided to focus her energy on setting up a new charity.
“There were a lot of things that I wanted to do and I just felt that I was making no impact to the world in what I was doing. I decided to go to Nepal as it is the twelfth poorest country in the world and has so many problems with healthcare and infrastructure. I planned to head over for six months teaching English in orphanages and then go to Tibet to write a book but once I went over and saw the conditions that these children are living in, I had to do something about it.”
When Nicky’s business clients heard of her trip, they began making donations to help the people of Nepal and before long, she decided that setting up a charity would be the best way of handling the funds.
“I set up the charity in November 2006, mostly for tax purposes and accountability. I decided to do as much fundraising as possible, so I set up two black tie balls, one in Dublin and one in Galway and they took place in January. Between the two balls I raised about Ä70,000, which was phenomenal considering my target had been Ä20,000! I had planned to give the money to charities in Nepal for them to distribute but when I got out there I discovered that there was a lot of corruption and things weren’t being handled very well. Nepal is the third worst country in the world for corruption. I felt I had a responsibility to make sure the money was put to good use, so I decided to set up my own projects on the ground.”
Since 2006, Nicky and the charity have done great work in Humla, one of the poorest areas of Nepal where the average income per capita is Ä100 a year compared to Ä40,000 in Ireland. The next step for the charity is to teach local women how to produce Fairtrade goods so that they can raise their income levels.
“We concentrated on three main areas - healthcare, income generation and education. We have just set up a primary healthcare and maternity service for the 30,000 people in the area we were working in. The next priority is income generation for the families, so we are looking to form the local women into co-ops to produce sustainable food for sale in Ireland. Finally, there needs to be an education system for the children.
At present, a lot of the children from the age of six are sent to orphanages thousands of miles away to get an education and many never see their children again. The children live in an institutional environment with no love. There is also a lot of abuse going on in these situations, with Western paedophiles running some homes, and these children are very vulnerable. Many end up homeless on the streets of Kathmandu, taking drugs. These children need to be at home with their families and get an education at the same time, so that is what we are working on right now.”
Despite having to sign on for unemployment benefit as the law does not allow the charity to pay her a salary, Nicky is very happy with her decision and now spends ten months of the year in Nepal.
“The Nepalese are a very warm, welcoming people and I am really enjoying the work we are doing and the results that we are getting. Hopefully we can keep raising as much money as possible to continue the work and really make a different to these children and their families.”
Not one to rest on her laurels, Nicky is also currently training to complete a triathlon and hopes to write a book in the future. For now she is on the fundraising trail for the people of Nepal but still manages to find time for her favourite hobby: having a pint and a bit of craic in the pub!
The Irish Nepalese Children’s Charity is holding a Flag Day on Saturday 28 March. To volunteer, call Nicky on 087-6864936.
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