Community Simpani  Nurturing a Culture of Community 

As part of his life mission, Nirmal Khatri lives his life as a student and advocate of eco-social spiritual transformation.

 

He is passionate about leveraging his post-graduate education (in development studies), training, and livelihood activities to advance his research and intervention in the field of regenerative community development. He received the Gandhi Mandela Freire (GMF) Fellowship Award in 2022 for his more than 300-hour learning journey, which focused on cultivating conscience and compassion that fuel positive eco-social development and community-building activities via immersion, introspection, research, and civic engagement.

 

He lives in and contributes to his mountain eco-community, where he spends much of his time trekking through the surrounding mountains, tending to the terraced fields in the hamlet, growing his own vegetables, gardening, and educating the local children about the importance of education and the environment. He enjoys traveling and farming in the mountains, and he uses this experience to deepen his understanding of the close relationship that exists between the individual, society, and nature.

 

After the 2015 earthquake, Nirmal worked with local, state, federal, and international organizations to assist approximately 5,000 families in 14 districts of Nepal in regaining their immediate homes and schools. He has spent the last four years working for the Spanish non-governmental organisation Hugging Nepal, where he has successfully renovated three public schools in rural areas. During COVID-19, he oversaw relief, rescue, and rehabilitation efforts for impoverished areas, working in a networked fashion with individuals and groups all around the world. He helped set up WiFi in outlying rural areas so that schoolchildren could finish their education during long periods of lockdowns.

 

In 2020, he co-created and participated in the community grassroots initiative Virtue in Movement-Global Nepal (VIM), which aimed to promote values, virtues, and meaning amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. He is currently VIM's co-leader. At the moment, Nirmal works as the Gandhi Mandela Freire (GMF) Fellowship Coordinator at the Loyola Extension Services (LES)/LES Multiversity in Kerala, India. Together with the Community Innovation Organisation (CIO), he creates community initiatives. He established the Community Living & Learning Centre Simpani in the Nepalese foothills in 2022, and it is now under his management. He also serves as coordinator for DIG Tölz-Nepal, a German organisation that works on social projects that include education in rural Nepal.

 

Nirmal seeks to create a values-driven, virtue-driven, meaning-driven, regenerative community that upholds the rights of the environment, eco-socio-spiritual lifestyles, intercultural understanding, and co-existence while working with interconnected and integrated spaces and concepts. Creating several cooperative relationships with various organizations and individuals is one aspect of this goal. Nirmal tackles the revolutionary journey of society from a comprehensive viewpoint, which is much needed at this moment. His current areas of interest are preventive health practices, empowering technologies for individuals who live far away and isolated, and instilling virtues, values, and meaning in education for emancipation.