Impact
Seven summits. Seven organisations. One reason.
Every climb has been a fundraiser. Dr. Sara set out to climb the highest peak on each continent for seven different organisations working to empower women and girls.
Climb Your Everest
The nonprofit she founded to keep it going year-round.
Empowering marginalised women and young girls to lead fulfilling lives.
Dr. Sara is the founder and president of Climb Your Everest, a nonprofit empowering marginalised young women through educational programmes. Its approach is research-based and participatory — action-oriented rather than advisory, built with the young women it serves rather than for them.
The funding model runs through her own work: proceeds from the book are donated, and registering for one of her workshops pays for another young woman in need to take part in it.
Partners
The organisations she climbs for
Seven organisations, in Nepal, Tanzania, Iran and the United States, each working on a different part of the same problem. Every one of them takes donations directly.
Nepal
Empower Nepali Girls
Scholarships, mentoring, career guidance and subsistence for girls at the greatest risk of early marriage, sex slavery or being left orphaned — so they finish school and go on into medicine, engineering, business and teaching. Dr. Sara serves on the board as director of development and has worked alongside the international volunteer team on the ground.
Tanzania
Kupona Foundation
Treatment for women living with obstetric fistula, a condition that makes outcasts of them and that one straightforward procedure can reverse. Since 2009 Kupona has raised over $3 million for its partner hospital in Dar es Salaam, CCBRT. Dr. Sara climbed Kilimanjaro for this one, and has met the women it treats.
Iran
OMID Foundation
A two-and-a-half-year residency programme for disadvantaged young women in Tehran, built on three things: self-empowerment, education and training. Women leave it able to live confidently within a society that had written them off. Dr. Sara has visited the centre and met them.
United States
Justice + Joy National Collaborative
Formerly National Crittenton. Advocates for girls, young women and gender-expansive young people living with chronic adversity — those inside the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, and those facing homelessness, poverty, young motherhood or trafficking. Dr. Sara climbed Denali, the highest peak in North America, to raise funds and attention for them.
United States
Planned Parenthood
Reproductive health care, sex education and information for millions of people worldwide, founded on the idea that women should have the care and the information they need to live healthy lives — no ceilings, no limits.
International
Child Foundation
Keeps children living in poverty in school — many of them orphans or caught in emergencies, all of them high achievers. Working with Empower Nepali Girls, it sponsors dozens of girls in Nepal, where sex trafficking is a serious risk.
Why it started
The climb was never the point.
Dr. Sara was teaching when she met the founder of Empower Nepali Girls and learned what happens to girls in Nepal who lose access to school. She decided to climb Everest to fund and publicise their scholarships. She had never climbed a mountain.
Ten years and seven summits later, the framing has not changed: the mountain is a way to get people to pay attention to the girls at the bottom of it.
When you help others climb their Everest, you become one step closer to your Everest.
TEDx
Climb Your Everest
Sponsor a climb, fund a scholarship, host a fundraiser.
If your organisation wants to put its weight behind this work, Dr. Sara would like to hear from you.