Welcome to Lift A Life Foundation: Our Story and Why We Exist

Most organisations introduce themselves with a number. Lives changed, communities reached, meals served. We are going to start somewhere else, because the number would not be honest yet.

Lift A Life Foundation is a Community Based Organisation registered with the County Government of Kiambu under certificate RSC/3811/CBO/2024, issued on 22 February 2024. We work out of Ruiru, in Gitothua Ward, and our registration names three activities: caring for orphans and vulnerable children, the elderly and people living with disabilities; advocacy; and networking and community building.

That is the formal answer. The real one is simpler. There are people in our community who are carrying more than anyone should carry alone, and we decided to stop walking past.

What we actually do

Our work is ordinary and it is constant.

It looks like sitting with a child in a wheelchair at mealtime, because feeding a child who cannot feed themselves takes patience and hands and time that a stretched centre does not always have. It looks like arriving at a home where a grandmother is raising three grandchildren on a widow's income, and carrying in flour, cooking oil, soap and sanitary towels. It looks like visiting an older man who has not had a conversation in four days.

None of that photographs like a groundbreaking ceremony. It does not produce a headline. But it is the difference between a family coping and a family collapsing, and it is what we were registered to do.

We also support centres that were already doing this work before we existed. There are people in Ruiru who have been caring for children with severe disabilities for years, quietly, on almost nothing. They do not need us to tell them how. What they usually need is supplies, extra hands and someone who takes their calls.

Why we are not claiming more than this

If you have looked at this website before today, you may have seen it say things that were not true. Impact figures nobody had counted. Programmes we are not registered for. A leadership team that did not exist.

We have taken all of it down.

We would rather have a smaller website that is entirely true than an impressive one that is not. If a figure appears on this site, it is because someone counted it and can show you the working. If a story appears here, the family agreed to it. If we say we do something, it is on our certificate.

That is not modesty for its own sake. Anyone considering giving to a foundation in Kenya has good reason to be careful, and the only sensible response to that is to be verifiable. Our registration number is published. Our officials are named. Our accounts can be asked about. If something here cannot be checked, it should not be here.

Who is accountable

Three people are registered as the foundation's officials with the county, and are the signatories on our bank account: Eunice Wangari Muthoni as Chairperson, Judith Muthoni Wangari as Secretary, and Peter Minja Macharia as Treasurer. Any two of the three sign on behalf of the foundation.

Our registration is renewed annually and we file quarterly returns with the County Government of Kiambu. If you want to see the documents before you give or partner with us, ask, and we will send them.

What is coming

The story of how this foundation began belongs to the people who lived it, and we are documenting it properly rather than writing a paragraph that sounds good. It will be published here in their own words, with the interviews and photographs that go with it.

The same goes for the families we walk with. Some of their stories are extraordinary. None of them will appear on this site without permission, and where a child is involved, without their guardian's consent in writing. A charity that trades a family's dignity for a donation has already lost the thing it was supposed to protect.

Over the coming days we are publishing a short series about how this work happens and how people can be part of it: what communities can do together, what volunteers actually change, how businesses can help beyond a cheque, and what transparency means when you say it out loud.

If you want to be involved

There are three honest ways in.

Give. Our M-Pesa paybill is 400200, account 1151353, and our bank details are on the donate page. Every shilling goes into the work described above.

Volunteer. Home visits and centre support need people more than they need anything else. If you can give an afternoon, we can use it.

Connect us. If you run a business, a centre or a group and can see where you might fit, tell us. A great deal of what we do is introduction and follow-through.

And if you simply want to know more before deciding anything, that is fine too. Ask us hard questions. We would rather answer them than have you wonder.