So many members of the public have supported the children through organising or participating in fundraising activities, by one-off donations and regular sponsorship of individual children. We’ve been helped by volunteers in all sorts of areas. We’ve received donations of items for Christmas boxes, undies, second-hand uniforms, the list is too long to mention.
A special mention must go to Geoff, our UK volunteer who provides regular updates to sponsors of individual children and to all supporters of the school. There is a lot of work that Geoff puts in behind the scenes.
We’ve been helped a lot in recent years by the business coaching organisation, ActionCOACH.
As part of their aim to support local charities in all of the many countries in which they work, Sally, our chairperson trustee, has been coached for free by ActionCOACH since 2019. Through their client and wider network they have also provided a range of services for free, from graphic design, our Little Faces website, IT equipment and IT support, the new Empowering Kids in Kenya website and much more.
Alan has provided marketing support and either edited or wrote the copy for our websites. He can be a very patient chap at times.
Through our coach and his clients we have received a series of generous donations and funds raised from a variety of activities. Our playground purchase would not have been possible without their support, particularly from East Midlands Reactive Maintenance Ltd. Our science lab for the new school was funded by ActionCOACH, as was this website (and they helped with the words and design of the site) too.
Our thanks go to Sally’s coach, Alan Brighton, his wife Sheila Brighton, and all his clients, for all their amazing help and support. The kids have named our head rooster “Mr Alan” in his honour.
Barbara Morse and her former business enterprise, All Seasons Boutique in Sandy, have supported the charity in a brilliant way.
Many of the children come from such poor backgrounds that they have to go without the basics of everyday life, just to make sure the family can eat. We realised very quickly that meant the girls in our school were going without knickers, and the mothers were going without knickers and bras. It’s the same for the boys and pants. Our appeal for help met with an amazing response.
Babs spread the word and her customers rummaged through their drawers (pun intended) and have donated no end of good quality underwear.
There seems to be a superabundance of unused underwear out there.
Rotary – It’s no exaggeration to say that without Rotary International, there would probably be no Bombolulu school. Their support has been paramount to the success of this small but important school. To the children, the staff and the community. THANK YOU ROTARY.
Rotarians superbly supported our sponsored bike ride to Paris and back. Raising over £5,000. Sally Searle and Tim Tucker are Rotarians who undertook the bike ride plus Geoff Ward and Graham Porter. Without the support of Rotary and Rotarians, our school would not be the exceptional place that it is.
We’ve had support from several UK and overseas charities, giving us donations for specific projects, books and educational supplies.
Two of the star pupils with poor and difficult backgrounds from Little Faces school have been directly sponsored by two of our supporters into very good secondary schools. You can see how they’ve developed in our stories section – LATEST – former pupils.
And a number of branches of the Women’s Institute in and around the Home Counties have supported us with donations. Our appeals for bras and knickers to send out to Kenya have helped lots of their members to declutter their undies drawers.
Over the years we’ve had multiple forms of support from DHL, both in the UK and in Kenya. They’ve helped us with direct donations and have run multiple fundraising initiatives working with their teams. They’ve helped with a wide variety of projects to send much needed items, like clothing and toys that we’ve collected and sent to Kenya for the school and the community. They have helped enormously with the cost of shipping to Kenya and have also directly provided a large quantity of food for the children during the covid pandemic. The children and community were quite literally starving as work was curtailed and therefore income severely compromised during this period.
A number of our trustees and other volunteer helpers have been DHL employees at some stage in their careers. Many of the sponsors of the children still are. The DHL Foundation still supports us with matching grants for fundraisers undertaken by current and former employees. Wendy Walton was a DHL CSR lead and did a brilliant job in supporting our charity and many other projects to improve the lives of those less fortunate.
We can’t thank DHL enough for all their support right from the beginning of the charity over a decade ago.
Similarly, we’ve had a lot of help with fundraising from Jaguar Land Rover. They have sponsored an outing for the children annually which has overjoyed these underprivileged children.
We now have an excellent corporate partner in George Davies Turf. Thanks to George and his brilliant team, 7 of our children have sponsors. Not only that, but they have recently donated towards our Big Give Christmas Challenge. Hopefully their generosity will be matched by the fundraising platform.
Our school manager, Nancy, has been on continued professional development with her training on how to run a private secondary school. This is fairly intensive as it is a very new curriculum for all the management. There is a lot of legislation that affects these new lower secondary schools and it is a steep learning curve. But Nancy is well qualified and well capable of learning everything that is presented to her.
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In March 2022 the Rotary Club of Mombasa Downtown organised a one-day medical camp held in the new school building and on the playground under canopies. This camp provided free medical help in the form of general out-patient and specialist…
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Government regulations now mean we must have a playground and the rented land we used immediately behind the school was no longer available for rent. The cost to buy the land was £32,000. This seems high but it’s just the going rate and we had no other alternatives.
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