Atoot

A week of colour. 🌈

Atoot's U-7s spent a week exploring one simple theme — and what unfolded was anything but simple.

They learned colour names in English and Nepali, raced to colour corners when their colour was called, filled butterfly and animal outlines with coloured paper, and sat down for their very first finger painting session.

That last one surprised us. Given free rein to paint however they liked, every single child — without a word to each other — painted in straight vertical lines, top to bottom. All of them. The same quiet, instinctive pattern, arrived at independently. We're still thinking about that one.

The biggest surprise, though, came during group activities. These are kids who usually fight over materials. This week, they passed the glue, helped each other paste, and worked side by side without being asked.

Colour, it turns out, has a way of bringing people together. 🎨

We Are In. 🤍⚽

Today, thousands of organisations across the world are doing what Atoot does — using football to open spaces for young people who were never meant to occupy them. Different countries, different fields. The same belief.

We are one small part of something very big happening today.

This week, after seven years of bumpy ground and girls clearing weeds with farming tools from home, our field in Lumbini was finally flattened. That field exists because people believed it should.

Our goal is $10,000 — to keep the sessions running, the field open, and the opportunities growing. If this story has moved you, today is the day to show it.

Give big. Give small. Give what you can. But give today. 🤍

🔗 Link in bio to donate. PayPal & Zelle QR codes in the photos.

Seven years in the making. 🌱⚽

For seven years, Atoot has played on a tiny patch of public land nestled between agricultural fields in Lumbini — a plot once used for grazing cattle, transformed by a group of girls who refused to let imperfect conditions stop them.

Every year after the monsoons, the girls would arrive with farming tools from home — clearing wild grass and weeds with their own hands, reclaiming their field one season at a time. The ball still rolled into ditches and neighbouring fields. There was never a flat surface for even a proper 5-a-side. But they kept showing up anyway.

This week, something long overdue finally happened.
With the support of the local rural municipality government, an excavator arrived on our ground — digging up, levelling, and flattening the entire surface. Getting here took years of persistence, constant follow-up, and refusing to let it drop. But we had a narrow window — the fields around us had just been harvested, the only time an excavator can reach our ground without trampling crops. We weren’t going to miss it.

The before and after photos say everything.
This is what happens when girls take ownership of their space, when a community believes in them, and when local government and a grassroots organisation decide to work together. A flat field sounds like a small thing. For these girls, it changes everything.