Everest Avalanche Appeal
Project details
On Good Friday, 18 April 2014, an avalanche broke off the Khumbu Icefall above Everest Base Camp and killed 16 Nepali climbing Sherpas, at the time the deadliest single accident on the mountain. Many of the men were from the upper Khumbu area the Trust has worked in since the 1960s. Within hours the Himalayan Trust launched the Everest Avalanche Appeal to fund school scholarships for the 31 children the men left behind.
After other funds and foundations took on some of the 31 children, the Trust settled on covering roughly 18 of them through school to Grade 12, working with Nepal's Mountaineering Association. Field notes from the time record families in Kathmandu who had lost their only income, including one young widow shut out by in-laws who blamed her for her husband's death. The appeal grew into the ongoing Mountain Disaster Relief Education Support scholarship, still funding several of those children's schooling a decade on, four of them in the 2024-25 school year.
Michael Gill, chair of the Himalayan Trust, was in Nepal when news of the avalanche came through and issued the Trust's first statement within hours: "We extend our heartfelt condolences to the families and friends of the climbers... Many of the climbers are from the upper Khumbu area, where we focus our development aid..." The Trust set up the Everest Avalanche Appeal that same day, through the crowdfunding platform Givealittle, alongside a planned gala dinner at the Auckland Museum and smaller events in Christchurch and Nelson.
The sixteen dead climbers left 31 children between them. Some were already grown, one was a monk who needed no support, and others were already sponsored by other funds, among them the Fondation Benoit Chamoux and the Alpine Ascent Sherpa Education Fund. The Himalayan Trust, working through Nepal's Mountaineering Association under a memorandum of understanding, took direct responsibility for the rest, roughly 18 children in total, including ten who had not yet started school, committing to fund them right through to the end of Grade 12.
To make good on a commitment running out to 2031, the Trust set up an Everest Investment Fund in New Zealand, targeting a modest 6 percent annual return, structured around monthly scholarship payments that rose with each child's school level. It raised roughly NZ$83,000 in the first year with Himalayan Trust UK, against an estimated total programme cost of around US$264,000, and asked its own board to put in NZ$50,000 of reserves to help close the gap. As the Trust itself acknowledged at the time, "disaster appeals are certainly not our core business," but the response drew directly on skills it already had, in teacher training, salaries and scholarships.
The appeal has long outlived the news cycle that began it. Renamed the Mountain Disaster Relief Education Support scholarship and now co-funded with the American Himalayan Foundation, it was still paying school fees for four of the original children in the 2024-25 school year, a decade after the avalanche, one of whom finished Grade 12 that year.