How Businesses Can Partner With Lift A Life Foundation

Most approaches to businesses ask for a cheque. It is the easiest thing to ask for and often the least useful thing a business can give.

A company's real advantages are its stock, its expertise, its premises, its logistics and the people it knows. Those are frequently worth more to a small organisation than the equivalent in cash, and they cost the business less to give.

What is genuinely useful

Goods you already handle. Foodstuffs, soap, detergent, sanitary towels, tissue, cooking oil. If you distribute or retail any of these, giving stock costs you wholesale while being worth retail to us. Short-dated stock that is still perfectly good is especially welcome.

Transport. A vehicle going somewhere with space in it. Getting supplies from A to B is a recurring cost that a business with a delivery route can absorb almost invisibly.

Professional time. An accountant, lawyer, physiotherapist, nurse or special-needs teacher giving a few hours does something we could not otherwise afford at all.

Storage. Somewhere dry and secure to keep supplies between a bulk purchase and a delivery. Unglamorous, and it changes what we can accept.

Equipment you are replacing. Working wheelchairs, mobility aids, furniture, computers. Serviceable equipment that no longer suits your business is often exactly what a centre needs.

Your network. An introduction from a business people already trust opens doors that cold approaches do not. This costs nothing and is regularly the most valuable thing offered.

And cash, honestly

Money still matters, and it does one thing the list above cannot: it covers what nobody wants to sponsor. Transport fuel. Phone credit for follow-up calls. The unglamorous middle of the work.

A modest standing contribution is worth more to us than a larger one-off, because it lets us commit to a centre or a family rather than hope. Our M-Pesa paybill is 400200, account 1151353, and bank details are on the donate page.

What we will and will not do in return

We will name you as a partner where you would like that, and we will tell you specifically what your support did, with records to back it up.

We will not stage photographs of beneficiaries for your marketing. We will not put a child's face on a corporate campaign. Where a story involves a family, it is told with their permission and on their terms or not at all.

That is not us being difficult. A partnership that trades a family's dignity for visibility damages your reputation as surely as ours, and it will be noticed.

We also will not claim outcomes we have not measured, in your reporting or ours. If you need evidence for a CSR report, we would rather give you a smaller verified figure than a large unverifiable one.

Why partner with a small CBO

The honest case is proximity and traceability.

We are registered with the County Government of Kiambu under certificate RSC/3811/CBO/2024, we renew annually and we file quarterly returns. We work in one place, Ruiru, with people we know by name. When you give something, we can tell you which household or which centre received it, and you can go and see for yourself.

That is harder to do with a large national organisation, where your contribution joins a pool. Neither model is wrong. But if you want to know exactly where your support went, a small local organisation can show you in an afternoon.

The corresponding honesty is about scale: we are small. If you need a partner who can absorb a very large programme immediately, that is not us today. Tell us the size of what you are considering and we will say plainly whether we can carry it.

How to start

Send us a short message saying what your business does and what you think you could offer. That is genuinely enough to begin. We will come back with what would be most useful rather than accepting whatever is offered and finding a use for it later.

If you would like to see the work before committing, ask. We would rather you visited, met the people involved, and decided with your eyes open.

Our contact page has the details, and you can reach us on WhatsApp for something quicker.