Our Story
Hope begins with people who refuse to look away
Founded in Toronto by Rajasree and Lilibet, Hope Beyond Scarcity exists to fund the months after one-time generosity runs out.
Two girls. Two countries. The same quiet realization: that what decides whether a community holds together is often smaller than anyone expects — a broken pump, a check that arrives on schedule or doesn't, a visitor who comes once and never again.
This is the story of how Rajasree and Lilibet compared notes and decided to fund the months after that.
Founder
Rajasree
Born 2009 · Toronto
Rajasree was born in 2009, in Toronto. Bangladesh was her mother's voice on Sunday calls and her grandmother's stories — a place she knew by ear, not by sight.
She went for the first time in 2023, at fourteen, staying with an aunt who taught at a primary school that had gone three months without classes. The only water pump had broken, and there was no money to fix it until the next year's budget came through. Kids just stopped showing up.
The school reopened days before Rajasree flew home, once her aunt scraped together enough to send someone to buy the part herself.
Rajasree couldn't stop thinking about how small the gap was. A part. A bit of cash on the right day. None of it was fate.
Founder
Lilibet
Born 2010 · Toronto
Lilibet was born in 2010. Her godmother, Karen, is a missionary in Peru who has spent years caring for orphaned children.
In 2019, when Lilibet was nine, she visited and spent the trip at the home Karen runs. She remembers one boy, maybe five or six, who beat her at a card game she never learned the rules to and refused to explain, just laughing every time she lost.
That was the whole friendship — a game neither of them could name, for a week — and it was enough to leave a mark.
Comparing Notes
They landed on the same thing
Both places already had people doing the work — teachers, aunts, Karen herself — long before either of them showed up. What decided whether that work held together was smaller than they expected: a broken pump, a support check that arrived on schedule or didn't, a visitor who came once and never again.
One-time generosity is easy, and for about a month it looks exactly like the real thing.
Hope Beyond Scarcity exists to fund the months after that.
A Canadian not-for-profit corporation, based in Toronto, walking with families in Bangladesh and Peru beyond scarcity — one sustained month at a time.