How Communities Can Transform Lives Together

Networking and community building is one of the three activities Lift A Life Foundation is registered for. On a certificate it sounds like paperwork. In practice it is most of the job.

Here is why. In almost every community there is more capacity to help than is being used, and the reason it goes unused is rarely selfishness. It is that the person who needs help and the person who could give it do not know about each other.

The gap is information, not goodwill

A shopkeeper would happily set aside stock nearing its date, if someone told him where it should go. A retired nurse would give a morning a week, if anyone asked. A church has a hall standing empty five days out of seven. A family two streets away is quietly running out of food.

None of those people are withholding anything. They simply have no mechanism for finding each other. Poverty is often described as a shortage of resources, and sometimes it is. Just as often it is a shortage of connection between resources that already exist.

Much of our work is closing that distance. Linking a struggling household to a centre that can help. Introducing a business to a need it is well placed to meet. Finding the volunteers who live close enough to keep turning up, which matters more than enthusiasm.

Build on what is already there

There is a temptation, when an organisation arrives with resources, to build something new. A new programme, a new centre, a new committee. It is visible, it is attributable, and it is usually a mistake.

The churches, chiefs, self-help groups and care centres in Ruiru were here before us. They know which families are struggling and which are managing. They know who can be trusted. They will be here after us. When we strengthen what they already do, the help survives us. When we build something parallel, it lasts as long as our funding does.

This is why we support existing centres rather than opening our own. The people running them have years of expertise we do not have. What they lack is usually supplies, hands and someone who follows through, not knowledge.

What communities can do without any organisation at all

If you are reading this and wondering what you personally could do, none of the following requires us.

Know your street. Which households have an older person living alone? Which have a child with a disability? Which have gone quiet lately? A community that knows this cannot be surprised by a crisis it could have prevented.

Make the introduction. If you know a need and you know someone who could meet it, put them in touch. That single act is a large fraction of what community organisations do.

Show up more than once. A single visit is kind. A monthly visit changes a life, because it becomes something a person can rely on. Reliability is the scarce commodity, not generosity.

Ask before deciding. The most common failure in well-meaning help is bringing what we imagined was needed rather than what was actually needed. Families know their situation better than any visitor. Ask, then bring.

Protect dignity in public. How a family is spoken about at the shop matters. Being helped should not cost someone their standing among their neighbours.

Working with the county

Being a registered CBO gives us one practical advantage worth naming: we can raise things formally. Support exists on paper that families never receive, usually because nobody knew about it, the paperwork was daunting, or there was no one to follow it up.

Following it up is unglamorous work. It is phone calls, forms and going back a fourth time. It is also frequently the difference between a family getting what they are entitled to and not. Our registration means we file quarterly returns and renew annually, which keeps us in regular contact with the county offices that make those decisions. That relationship is worth as much as any donation.

Where organisations fit

A community can do a great deal on its own. What it often cannot do alone is sustain effort over years, hold funds accountably, or keep records that let anyone learn what worked.

That is the honest role of an organisation like ours: continuity, accountability and memory. Not to be the source of the compassion, which the community already has in abundance, but to make sure it reaches the right place and keeps arriving after the initial impulse fades.

If you want to be part of that, our get involved page sets out the practical routes, and if you run a business, a group or a centre and can see where you might fit, tell us. Some of the most useful things that have happened in this work started with somebody sending a short message saying they thought they could help.