Gagan Dahal

Gagan Dahal is a Bhutanese-American community organiser and co-founder of the BRAVE Project (Bhutanese Response Assistance Volunteer Effort) in Cleveland, Ohio. Alongside his brother Hari Dahal and five other young Bhutanese refugees, he launched BRAVE during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide essential services to immigrant families in Greater Cleveland. The brothers' journey from refugee camps in Nepal to community leadership in the United States exemplifies the resilience and civic engagement of the Bhutanese refugee diaspora.^[1]

Early Life and Background

Gagan Dahal and his brother Hari were born to a Bhutanese refugee family of Nepali origin. The family arrived in the United States in 2013 after years in refugee camps in Nepal, part of the large-scale third-country resettlement programme that relocated over 100,000 Bhutanese refugees to countries including the United States, Canada, and Australia. The Dahal brothers settled in the Greater Cleveland area of Ohio, one of the major resettlement destinations for Bhutanese refugees in America.^[2]

Connecting Cleveland

While attending Cleveland's Lincoln-West High School and Lakewood High School, the Dahal brothers and a group of friends launched Connecting Cleveland, a bilingual newspaper aimed at bridging the communication gap between the Nepali-speaking Bhutanese community and the broader Cleveland population. The newspaper published for over a year and laid the groundwork for the brothers' later community organising efforts. The publication demonstrated the young refugees' commitment to civic participation and intercultural understanding.^[3]

Founding of BRAVE

In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affected immigrant communities in Cleveland, seven young Nepali refugees — including Gagan and Hari Dahal — founded the BRAVE Project. The acronym stands for Bhutanese Response Assistance Volunteer Effort. The organisation was created to serve Greater Cleveland's immigrant families, many of whom worked frontline jobs in the service industry and lived in congregate housing where the virus spread rapidly.^[4]

BRAVE volunteers — including nurses, drivers, supply chain workers, and shoppers — delivered food, medical supplies, and COVID-19 education directly to families' homes. A key part of the organisation's work was combating misinformation about the virus within immigrant communities where English-language public health messaging was not reaching residents effectively.^[5]

Growth and Technology

Hari Dahal, who was hired by Microsoft as a software developer, created a HIPAA-compliant mobile application to manage BRAVE's volunteer operations, enabling volunteer assignment, client information management, and delivery dispatching. The brothers also established Nebham LLC, a software company developing volunteer-management applications for other nonprofits. The BRAVE Project expanded beyond Cleveland to chapters in Akron, Columbus, Dayton, Cincinnati, and surrounding states.^[6]

The group also established Connecting Cleveland Community (3C) as a registered nonprofit, providing a formal institutional framework for their community service work. By the end of 2020, BRAVE had assisted over 300 Cleveland-area families.^[7]

Legacy

The Dahal brothers' story reflects the broader experience of young Bhutanese refugees who have channelled the hardships of displacement into community leadership in their adopted countries. Their work with BRAVE and Connecting Cleveland highlights the contributions of the Bhutanese diaspora to American civic life, particularly in cities like Cleveland, Columbus, and Pittsburgh that received significant numbers of resettled refugees. Spectrum News 1 profiled the brothers' work as an example of immigrant-led pandemic response in Ohio.^[8]

References

Contributed by BhutanWiki Editorial