Our Story

It is so much easier to create change when you focus your attention.  That’s why we operate at village level.  We really get to know the communities that we work with, and they really get to know us.

Our strategies are flexible within the following ten point framework;

We have integrity.

Honesty, transparency and accountability are at the heart of everything that we do.

We are inspired.

The inspiration to help.  The need to keep trying.  The desire to have fun.   It makes us happy.

We respect.

We value human rights.  We respect all people regardless of race, gender, religion, age and sexual preference.

We have respect for the Earth and all living things.

We are neither political nor religious.

While we completely respect the right of all people to their political and religious beliefs, we do not endorse or promote any particular religious or political view.

Consultation is not just a word to the Happy Villages crew.  It is a commitment to the communities that we work in to completely respect their right to self determination.  We take the time to meet with as many of the community members as possible, including women and people of all ages and abilities.  We engage them in genuine and continuous dialogue to ensure our programs properly serve them.  We do not enter a community with a set of off-the-shelf project blueprints to impose upon the people that live there.

Happy Villages acts like a magnet for assistance for the community by helping them to prepare for interactions with outsiders.  One important aspect is to help them obtain a degree of consensus about what will most benefit them.  Our role is to find an appropriate partner organisation to fulfill each need and to nurture the relationships between the partners, Happy Villages and the community.  If no suitable partner exists, we do the job ourselves.

Our staff (mostly volunteers at this stage), work across a range of sectors, as follows:

–      Sustainable agriculture;

–      Environment;

–      Water and sanitation;

–      Health;

–      Education;

–      Energy, communications and transport;

–      Gender.

While we believe strongly in volunteering, we realize that it has limits.  If people are being forced by their circumstances to search for food for hours every day, of course we won’t expect them to volunteer.  We do not use the amount of resources donated by the community to measure their commitment.  That would further disadvantage extremely poor communities with nothing to give.

We believe that communities with nothing to give are most in need of our help.  That’s why we use a genuine process of consultation, conducted by qualified, local (Kenyan), community development workers to obtain and assess commitment.