Board of Directors
Dr. Evelyn Y. Iraheta, President
Dr. Iraheta has served as a Bilingual School Counselor in the District of Columbia Public Schools for more than 10 years serving youth and families. In this role, she has been tasked with providing equitable and appropriate comprehensive counseling services addressing students’ academic, career and social/emotional development needs while also balancing delivery methods and maintaining program accountability. She has also responded to crisis intervention at her school and other DCPS schools. Dr. Iraheta served as a chair in the school's counseling department, requiring her to lead meetings and support a team of middle and high school counselors as well as collaborate with other service providers, including social workers, the school psychologist, the pathways coordinator, and college/career coordinators. Prior to this role, she worked in varied local and national organizations in program management, curriculum development, and public policy. Additionally, Dr. Iraheta is the owner and chief clinical consultant for Plena Counseling & Consulting, LLC, a private practice based in DC that offers holistic counseling, and consultation services to the DMV area. She has authored thousands of mental health evaluations for legal and immigration purposes since 2018. She has provided expert consultation services to individuals, and immigration law firms in the DMV area and has served as an adjunct professor and clinical supervisor for varied universities, including Trinity Washington University, University of Southern California, Walden University, and George Washington University. Dr. Iraheta has participated in local, national, and international conferences promoting effective practices for working with diverse and immigrant communities.
Dr. Evelyn Iraheta is a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) in the District of Columbia and a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor in the state of Maryland and Licensed Professional Counselor in the Commonwealth of Virginia. She is a National Certified Counselor (NCC) through the National Board for Certified Counselors (NBCC), and Approved Clinical Supervisor in Virginia through the Virginia Board of Counseling. Dr. Iraheta has ample experience in areas of trauma with children, youth, and adults, including but not limited to abuse and neglect, domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking among other types of traumas. She has extensive experience providing culturally and trauma-based individual, group and family psychotherapy to low-income families and diverse client populations in English and Spanish. She is knowledgeable of current best practices, research, and empirical data relevant to immigrant and diverse populations.
Bhim Bahadur B K, Vice President
His professional engagement includes FEDO (Feminist Dalit Organization) as executive director. Initially, before entering the development field, he taught IT in schools and engineering colleges and supervised students in their project works. He has mentored many national and international students who come to Nepal and his organization for internship. He received a master’s degree in education, specializing in health. He has presented paper on various issues related to youth, women, education, social change, climate change & participated in many international conferences including in India, Thailand, Bangladesh, UK, Netherlands, Switzerland, UAE, Ghana, and the United States. He has championed education rights, women's health, girls' education, reproductive health rights, economic empowerment, Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI) and shaped policies that reduced marginalization of women, children, and adolescents. He brings invaluable talent, visionary and practical leadership, and a strong network of collaborators to reach the underserved with services, resources, and information to impact the life of the children, youth, women and community people. He has more than additional 10 years of combined experience in web design, database design and administration, health research, and overall IT applications. He can design and develop computerized M&E systems as well as any other forms of information management systems. In addition, he acts as a facilitator to translate community and grassroots development issues to end users at the project and field level. He has added expertise in participatory project planning and management, staff motivation and development, administration and logistics, and sustainable community development.
Mr. Bhim Bahadur B K is a development professional with more than 22 years of experience in the development field. He holds a master’s degree in education specialized in health education from Tribhuvan University (T.U.) Nepal. Currently, he is working as a Chief Executive Officer of PDRC International, a non-profit organization, dedicated to providing educational and leadership opportunities for children and youth through equitable access to education, leadership development, community development, advocacy and career development program. He worked as the CEO for Childbirth Survival International (CSI), a global 501(c)(3) nonprofit reaching the underserved with health services, resources, and information, collaborating with country governments, partner organizations including faith-based organizations, and most importantly the communities in sub-Saharan Africa, Texas and Maryland. In addition, he is serving as a Maryland state leader for UNICEF-USA, advisor of the mayor of Baltimore City from AAPI Community and affiliated with different non-profit and professional organizations. Prior to this, he worked as country director for the UK-based INGO named C4C (Chance for Change) that works for young people.
Lindsay Renick Mayer, Secretary
Lindsay Renick Mayer is the communications director for global conservation organization Re:wild and has more than 14 years of environmental communications experience. Previously she held positions at The Nature Conservancy and Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute. She is particularly passionate about using communications to persuade governments and courts to uphold the rights of nature, Indigenous peoples and local communities. When she is not working on protecting and restoring the planet, she is out enjoying nature with her wife and two kids.
Tanuja Pokhrel, Treasurer
Ms. Tanuja Pokhrel was born and grew up in Nepal. She has completed her master’s degree in English literature from Nepal and has had over 10 years of experience as an early childhood educator in the United States. Prior to arriving to the United States, Ms. Pokhrel worked as a researcher for a nonprofit organization called Center for Gender and Social Studies. She aslo worked as a campaigner and trainer in a local nongovernment organization that focused on women empowerment. Ms. Pokhrel’s hobbies includes writing, helping the most disadvantaged people, and traveling.
Dr. Bishnu Joshi
Bishnu Joshi, PhD, is a chemical biologist and a biomaterials scientist currently working at R&D Pharm Company Gel4Med. He is a native of Bajhang, in far western Nepal. Dr. Joshi is an ardent proponent of the upliftment of rural Nepal via quality education and youth entrepreneurship.
Advisory Board
Professor Dr. Pramod Parajuli, Chair
As a trans-disciplinary social scientist, scholar and educator, Dr. Parajuli is deeply seeking ways to heal and regenerate lifesystems, livelihoods, learning and leadership during this turbulent period (especially since 2020) of what he identifies as the “Combined Climate/Coronaviruses Disruptions” (CCCDs). He recognizes CCCDs as a valid and unavoidable response of Gaia to give us the mirror to reassess ourselves and our pathways. Clearly impacting from cellular to cosmic, at this juncture, the message is clear: HUMANITY is NOT at the center. LIFE, LIFE SYSTEMS and WEBS of LIFE, which envelop the ecosphere and every species on Earth, ARE. Professor Parajuli’s engaged pedagogies and scholarship are thus guided by the premise that at this critical juncture, the choices humanity has is between: “Upcycling to Regenerative,” or by default, “Downcycling to Degenerative.”
A passionate educator/advisor, Professor Parajuli has designed two master’s and two doctoral programs while successfully graduating 37 doctoral advisees and about 70 master’s students who are pioneering regenerative pedagogies and leadership work throughout the world. A graduate of Stanford in education, anthropology, and political ecology (1983-1990), he has taught at Stanford, Syracuse U (1991-98), Lewis and Clark College (1998-99), International Honors Program (1999-2000), Portland State (2001-2008), Prescott College (2008-2020), and Southwestern College (2020-). He is also active in the networks of Ubiquity University, Ecoversities, and the Regenerative Communities Network (RCN).
At Portland State (PSU), he designed and developed an interdisciplinary master’s program, Leadership in Ecology, Culture and Learning and also co-initiated the Learning Gardens program. One of his proudest contributions, through the award-winning Learning Gardens initiative, his team actualized the promise of connecting the university with K-12 landscape and the collectivity of children and youth, teachers and their parents. In this award-winning program, children and youth not only learn how to garden but they gardened to learn. A pleasant surprise for all, they gardened to learn every subject, almost grade-by-grade, topic-by-topic, week-by-week, and subject-by-subject. At PSU, he also nurtured another national award-winning innovation on the theme of Schools as Ecosystems. In this online learning platform, children and youth could turn their schools into living-learning laboratories and engage in more than 36 design and regenerative activities. In 2008, he moved to the high desert of the Colorado Plateau to start a new phase and engage at Prescott College. He embraced and embodied, another ecosystem, another reality. Here he served as the core faculty for the PhD program in sustainability education and offered leadership in designing and developing new graduate programs.
A prolific writer and thought leader in pedagogical, social and applied sciences, Dr. Parajuli has coined and contributed the notions of integrative socio-ecological regeneration (ISER), “social movement pedagogy,” “critique of development discourse,” “ecological ethnicities,” “bio-cultural diversities,” “soil-to supper/sustenance pedagogies,” “permaculture household,” “Gandhian environmentalism,” “environmentalism of the global south,” “Annapurna pluriversities” and “regenerative abundance.” Dr. Parajuli has published widely in the intersection of pedagogy, political ecology, food systems, and social sciences. He is the co-editor of the volume, Religion and Sustainable Agriculture (2016).
Jim Schulman
Jim Schulman is a regional sustainability strategist, an environmentally sensitive architect, and a social entrepreneur. He is the executive director of the Alliance for Regional Cooperation, a non-profit organization dedicated to sustainable regional economic development. Between 1999 and 2014 Jim administered a variety of deconstruction and salvage job training programs in partnership with the Youth Build Public Charter School, the DC Housing Authority, and US-EPA Region III. During the same period, he also directed restorative landscaping projects for the DC Department of Health, several Washington-area foundations, and the Washington Navy Yard. In 2005 Jim founded Community Forklift, a used building materials store in Prince George’s County, Maryland, which he ran for over a decade. He has also served as treasurer of the Building Materials Re-use Association, now known as Build Reuse.
Dr. Tulasi Acharya
Dr. Tulasi Acharya is an assistant professor of professional writing and public administration at South Georgia State College in Douglas, GA. Born in Nepal, he migrated to the United States in pursuit of higher education and holds a Ph.D. in public administration, along with degrees in creative non-fiction, women and gender studies, and professional writing. Dr. Acharya's academic interests revolve around marginalized communities, gender issues, and policies. He is a prolific writer, having authored over 500 newspaper articles and 12 books in both Nepali and English. His academic work is deeply rooted in narrative analysis, critical theory, and post-colonialism, with a commitment to advocating for the rights of underrepresented groups.
Dr. Rajendra Pangeni
Dr. Rajendra Pangeni was born and raised in Syangja, Nepal. He moved to Mumbai after high school to pursue his higher education. He returned to Nepal and worked in various schools and colleges as a teacher/lecturer and moved to the United Kingdom to pursue his master’s and Ph.D. Dr. Pangeni has received his post-doctoral training from Northwestern University and City of Hope National Medical Center in the United States. He received his research training in cancer epigenetics during his Ph.D. and postdoctoral fellowships. Currently, he works on cancer genetics/epigenetics and metastases, cancer epidemiology, experimental therapeutics, disease diagnostics and drug discovery as an assistant professor.
Dr. Sudeep Shrestha
Dr. Sudeep Shrestha is an academician, nutrition scientist, and a social entrepreneur, who is passionate about making a change in underprivileged rural communities in Nepal by means of facilitating in developing self- sustainable environment for the basic education, food and nutrition to children, and facilitating in developing more equitable markets for Nepalese farmers who are not properly trained at commercial farming and selling their produce. Dr. Shrestha has an undergraduate degree in Food Technology and Masters and PhD in Nutritional Sciences. He has been involved in various academic and nutrition research activities in various universities like Tribhuvan University, University of Connecticut, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University and the Ohio State University.
Himal Humagain
Himal Humagain has an MS degree in computer science from James Madison University. He is currently working as a program development officer in computer science. Himal has also worked in various national and international non-profit organizations. He has developed a technical education curriculum for children, parents and family members, and educators.
Krita Shahi
Krita Shahi has a bachelor of law degree from Nepal Law Campus, Tribhuvan University. He worked as a lawyer of the Supreme Court of Nepal for over nine years. Krita has also helped write legal documents of various non-profit organizations.