It all started with Lea’s trip through Africa in 2020, where she helped out in the Soweto slum at the Soweto Youth Initiative (now an important partner organization). Her volunteer work was teaching English and math to children who were unable to attend school due to lack of money. During this time, she began collecting donations to provide hot meals for these children. This planted the seed for our work.

Lea’s next thought was that not only a few children should go to school, but all. She sponsored the first child out of her own pocket and began to inspire friends and family in Germany to sponsor kids. Thus, our first core projects came into being in 2020: School Sponsorships and the Food Program. For legal reasons, both projects temporarily became part of the Soweto Youth Initiative, with Lea organizing and managing them.

Learning and eating were thus basic things in the lives of the first children, but what is childhood without fun? Out of this thought, also in the same year (2020) the first Poolday took place, which is still an annual ULT event and highlight for our children. 

The projects continued to grow and after a long struggle with bureaucracy, our non-profit organization “UNDER Lea’s TRUST” (ULT) was officially founded in Germany on May 6, 2021, right in the middle of the Corona pandemic, and then also our NGO “UNDER Lea’s INTERNATIONAL” (ULI) in Kenya on September 10, 2021. While the German organization was led by Lea alone, Lea and Bonface joined forces as a team in Kenya. After ULT was a “one woman show” for about a year, Annika and Tine joined the German team in spring 2021, followed by Samira in August. Since then, our team has been growing and the tasks of the individual team members have been more clearly defined and better and better distributed. With this progress we could and can realize more and more projects and actions.

The sponsorships, the ULT Happy CLUB, and our events, such as flea markets and open air events, are important pillars for our currently largest project: our future ULT school in Nairobi, with which we want to ensure the best possible support for the children. This mammoth project will demand a lot of work and energy from us and of course we will not neglect all our other projects.

Phew! That’s already a lot of projects and even more are planned! Since none of our projects would be possible without your support and the whole team behind ULT, we are always happy about more team members. Hence, we’re looking for helping hands in public relations, event management, accounting, video and project management, and as Instagram managers. If you know your way around any of these areas and would like to be a part of our amazing team, you can find all the details and our contact here:

https://under-leas-trust.org/de/join-our-team/