Our History
Where we have come from....
We are a new organization, yet our work goes back more than 23 years to the turn of the millennium. We began as a free meals program for less fortunate children in Kakamega through an initiative by the United Society of Friends Women of Kakamega (USFW-Kakamega). The SFW-Kakamega women provided free meals at Kakamega Friends Church compound. They later started to fundraise for scholastic materials for the needy kids who came to get meals. Afterwards, they were able to get more partners from the United States, most notably the Friends of Kakamega.
This partnership led to the establishment of a residential care facility for children, which came to be known as the Kakamega Orphans Care Centre (KOCC) in 2005. Much later, in 2020, Friends of Kakamega consolidated with Crossroads Springs Africa to become Friends of Kenya Rising. They remain our key funding partner to-date. As Kakamega Orphans Care Centre, we supported children in both residential care and through. Home-based care. We usually only enrolled one child from a family to the program. The student sponsorship program model ran until 2019, and then it changed.
After conducting assessment through monitoring and evaluation, we came to learn that a better way to help the children in our program is by supporting them in their own homes through their entire families. We took the initiative to start re-integrating children from the KOCC residential facility back into their homes with families and relatives. This process was slow, as we understood it might take a while for the children to adapt. We also provided psycho social support to the children so as to enable them to settle in comfortably with their families.
Later, through the guidance of our CEO Nelson Ida, we began to create structures that would underpin our new model supporting whole families. This model soon became known as Family Care. We officially started implementation of the Family Care model in 2019. In the following section, we provide more details as to why we see it as the best approach in supporting vulnerable children. We are also proud to state that we started taking this transformative course long before the government of Kenya signed into law the Children Act in 2022, which set into law family-based care (rather than institutional care) as the best way of promoting vulnerable children’s safety, care, and growth.
Our RoadMap
Contact Us
Office Address
1234-50100
Amalemba Kakamega, Kenya
Email Us
info@unitedkenyarising.org
Call Us
+254 113 213 424