UNC students help Kenyans with nonprofit

One Durham-based nonprofit is helping to bring Kenyans out of poverty through employment and education.

Tensions in Kenya escalated into violence in 2007, after incumbent President Mwai Kibaki was re-elected despite numerous international and domestic allegations of election tampering. This led to the “Kenyan Crisis,” which ended in 1,200 people killed.

But the violence in Kenya did not only claim the lives of its citizens. It also contributed to the destruction of their economy.

Then in 2010, Brad Brown and Joe Heritage founded Uhuru Child, a Durham-based nonprofit dedicated to helping the Kenyan people who were still reeling from the fighting of three years before, all while spreading Christian beliefs. The organization creates local businesses and puts the profit from these businesses toward building and running secondary schools.

Brown and his wife were living in Uganda at the time of the 2007 elections in Kenya and saw the consequences of the fighting as well as the need for both employment and education.

“We came back to the States with the vision to start a school,” Brown said. “Getting started was just seeing a need.”

Uhuru Child currently has three UNC students working as interns.

One of these students is junior Sierra Fender, who started working with Uhuru Child at the beginning of the school year. Her responsibilities involve planning the organization’s black-tie fundraiser, the Valentine’s Day Masquerade.

“This is an annual event that Uhuru Child hosts in order to raise funds for their projects in Kenya, such as providing a secondary education for young women and expanding upon their sustainable business opportunities there,” Fender said.

Marian Gibson helps run Uhuru Child’s new business endeavor, Uhuru Threads, which sells Kenyan-made goods in the United States.

Gibson started officially working for Uhuru Child in January, but she has been involved with the nonprofit since 2013 after she went on a week-long service trip to Kenya.

“On these trips, you see the way Uhuru translates love into action by creating jobs where there had been none and providing the opportunity for education for kids who could not afford it,” Gibson said. “I knew this was an organization I wanted to be a part of long term.”

Although one of Uhuru Child’s three main goals is Christian discipleship, Brown said he is adamant that they address the needs of the Kenyan people first, before they begin to speak about Christianity.

“Ultimately we want to love people who are living in extreme poverty so well that they would come to know Jesus Christ as their lord and savior,” Brown said. “But we don’t want to just preach at people; we want to meet their needs.”

Uhuru Child is just getting started, and as the organization grows, sights are being set on expansion into other African countries that could benefit from increased employment and education.

“Uhuru Child’s future is exceedingly bright,” Fender said. “Kenya is only the beginning.”

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