Our Health Day has become a little tradition by now. Once a year, the focus for our children in Kenya is entirely on health, prevention and topics that often don’t get enough attention in everyday life. We talk about dental health and personal hygiene, menstruation and other health related questions, with the aim of giving the children knowledge and practical support that will stay with them long after the day itself.
What remains exciting every single year, and unfortunately not the good kind of exciting 😄, is one question: Will we be able to secure the funding in time?

From the outside, a project like our Health Day may sound fairly simple. We organise a day, purchase hygiene products, prepare the programme and get started. But, of course, all of this comes with costs. And unfortunately, those costs don’t disappear just because our fundraising target is still a little further away than we’d like.
Until now, many of our additional projects have been funded through individual fundraising campaigns. When a Health Day was coming up, we raised money for it. When hygiene products were needed, wonderful people from our community started their own fundraising initiatives. And somehow, together, we have always managed to make it work.
We are incredibly proud of that. At the same time, we are noticing that this approach is becoming more difficult.

Many people are understandably being more careful with their money at the moment. The cost of living has increased, the future feels less predictable for many, and making a spontaneous donation to an individual project is not always as easy as it might have been a few years ago.
We feel that too.
But a Health Day cannot simply be planned once enough money happens to arrive. Our team in Kenya needs time to organise everything, materials need to be purchased and activities need to be prepared. And, of course, health needs don’t simply disappear because fundraising is difficult right now. It would be convenient, but unfortunately that’s not how it works. 😉
That’s why we want to move away from asking “Can we fund the next Health Day?” and towards asking “How can we make sure the Health Day can reliably take place every year?”

Our goal is actually quite simple. We want to create a reliable foundation of funding that we can count on for our Health Day every year.
That doesn’t mean there will never be special fundraising campaigns again. Quite the opposite. When new ideas come up or specific needs arise, we still want to be able to raise additional funds together with you. But the basics should already be covered.
Dental care, hygiene products and health education shouldn’t depend on how well an Instagram post performs or whether we manage to reach enough people in the three weeks before the Health Day.
Because sustainable work also requires sustainable planning.

And this is where regular supporters can make an enormous difference.
It doesn’t have to be a large amount. What helps us most is predictability. Five, ten or twenty euros given regularly towards our health projects allow us to do something that one off donations often cannot: plan months ahead and know what resources we can rely on.
For a small organisation like ours, that makes a huge difference. If a hundred people each contribute a small amount, one person doesn’t suddenly have to carry the cost of an entire project.
And perhaps the individual contribution feels a little lighter on the wallet too. 😊

Of course, we’ll continue to get creative, launch fundraising campaigns and probably find ourselves nervously refreshing a donation total more than once. That’s become a little bit of a tradition too.
But our goal for the Health Day is different.
We want to reach the point where we no longer have to say: “We hope we’ll be able to fund it again next year.”
We want to be able to say: “The next Health Day is happening. Of course it is.”
Because preventive healthcare for our children shouldn’t be an extra that we can only provide when enough money happens to be available. It should be a reliable part of our work.
And if many people contribute just a little, together we can make exactly that possible. 💛