Laguna Beach Woman Joins Board Of Directors, Impact Schools

LAGUNA BEACH, CA —Laguna Beach resident Barbara McMurray has been elected to the board of directors of Impact Schools, Inc., a nonprofit based in Aliso Viejo that provides educational opportunities to impoverished communities in western Nepal’s remote Kalikot region.

McMurray recently ended 10 years of service on the board of another NGO based in Laguna Beach, Chhahari, Inc., a nonprofit that formerly housed and educated up to 25 children in Nepal. She currently serves on the executive board for Democratic Women of South Orange County, the county’s largest Democratic club. She is a 20-year volunteer serving a third term on the Friendship Shelter, Inc. Board of Directors. That shelter provides homeless programs and services to Laguna Beach and South Orange County.

The foundation was started in 2015 by Prakash Bista, a 2017 Soka University graduate and one of the Orange County Register’s Most Influential People of 2014. Since then, the organization has constructed two schools that serve 248 students in kindergarten through sixth grade. One of the two schools, Modern Model Residential School, has a hostel for local impoverished or orphaned children.

Impact Schools feature solar powered-electricity, internet connection and digital library and computer lab facilities. Social entrepreneurship projects that include a vegetable farm, chicken farm, and bead-products enterprise employing local women benefit students and the community, according to McMurray.

"Because of pandemic lockdowns, schools in Kalikot and Nepal’s other remote districts were closed for almost nine months," McMurray says. "Impact Schools, however, operated for most of 2020 with strict safety measures in place."

Impact Schools became a lifeline, providing a month’s food supply to 160 families affected by the pandemic and monsoon rains. Coordinating with local governments, Impact Schools distributed 23,000 masks and necessary sanitizers to schools in two rural Kalikot district municipalities. It takes two days by bus and four hours on foot to reach the school from Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu.