The Black Cats football club was the initiative of Trustee Andrew MacDonald, who is a supporter of Sunderland United and used the name 'Black Cats' to start a football team in the industrial slums around Nairobi.

Traditionally we had always used football as one way of bringing kids together in sport and fun during the many Sisi Kwa Sisi rehabilitation camps every summer since 1996. Many of the children we supported at that time went to the same primary school (MUthurwa) where there was a field for sports. So, utilising the field and using money to buy the resources to start a youth club was a logical move.

Getting Muthurwa School on board was crucial so we paid for goal posts and nets to be built there, and provided footballs, boots and strips. Then we engaged a coach, Simon 'Coaches' Thuku, and provided the money for the team to enter a local football league and the transport to get to the matches.
Once the children had a 'goal' (excuse the pun) which was backed up with smart training tops, proper equipment and a structured training plan, plus of course the matches to work towards, we found the kids full of enthusiasm and pride.

The Black Cats was also a 'cool' name; it became synonymous with more than just a football team, it was now an identity in it's own right, something to aspire to.

Andy helped the team develop a committee and start up a junior Black Cats and a girls Black Cats. He took the idea to Embu where we were working with kids in a rescue centre. It then went to Western Kenya because the news had already travelled about this phenomenon that was suddenly making news. The 'Western Blacks' started recently in 2006.

The original Black Cats now compete in the national youth league and one of our players was selected by a scout for potential training with the Kenyan team.

As always, a small idea which has been created with little money but lots of advice and help, has turned into something big and successful. The Black Cats has the cups to prove it.

How to help: our monthly costs amount to around 25,000 Ksh. We also always need football tops, training kit, footballs and even coaches to come out to Kenya and assist. View Club History here
Hot Report for Season '07 here

Perhaps the mainstay of any charity dealing with street kids is to provide financial assistance for the children to go to school. Gavin's experience in the slums over many years painted a different picture though; school is just one factor in the childs life which needs to be attended to. Thus he provided support for the family so that the child became an asset rather than a liability. By making the family see that an educated child could break free of the poverty trap and eventually become a breadwinner for everyone, it enabled the family to become part of the process.


Not only the family; Gavin approached the schools in the area and made agreements to provide renovation and support with books and teaching aids in return for the school providing education for the children. This principle is crucial to the success that Moving Mountains now enjoys. By making everybody responsible for the welfare of the child - family, teacher, minister, doctor, donor - it created a far stronger structure for the child to grow up in.

Now Moving Mountains has supported hundreds of children through primary and secondary education, and some through college or vocational courses. The difference here is that the charity is taking a holistic view of the childs life, right the way into adulthood. Most charities do not do this, and it accounts for much of the skepticism that exists in Kenya about western donors who build structures but don't try to forge relationships.

Moving Mountains is seen as a family now, not as a charity. Gavin is a 'father' to many hundreds, and the Trustees are part of that. We give the support to mothers to look after their children and we reunite children with their mothers. We don't move children away, unless they are complete orphans, and we help to create 'chamas' or womens groups, which work as a co-operative to support their families.


Adventure Alternative provides work for the mothers and for the older kids, and the charity provides a sound financial base for giving money where it is needed. Some of the mums need medical care, some need a business grant, some need help with their rent and some need a supplement for their weekly food shopping. Every case becomes a personal case with us, and it accounts for a huge part of our monthly expenditure. However it is the most important because we are a charity that looks after living people, and we never forget that those people have hopes and fears and dreams. Our job is to give a little bit of consistent hope, to take away the daily fears and to let people dream of a better life.

This was a long term project we began in 2002 and is just one part of a wider plan to bring education and support to an entire community in a remote area of Western Kenya called Siaya. We call it the Ulamba Project.

During the 90's many children had been travelling the long distance from Siaya to Nairobi every year for our Sisi Kwa Sisi rehabilitation camps, so we decided one year to go to them. We discovered a beautiful lush region with wonderful people and a great need for help. One of the facilities we identified, with the help of our Kenyan friends like Maurice Odindo and Chief Matthews Anuso, was an orphanage for the many lost and abused children who are often left in the bush never to be heard of again.

Trustee Chris Little began the process of building trust with the local community, and we held many camps in the region to show our commitment. Eventually Chief Matthews agreed to donate a piece of land in a small hamlet called Ulamba, on which we could build an orphanage and a clinic, and renovate a disused and dilapidated community hall.


We used the Africamp Expeditions to provide the volunteers to come to Ulamba over a period of years and build the structure with local 'fundis' (builders), under the overall management of our project co-ordinator Francis Kioni. It was an expensive project so Adventure Alternative and Moving Mountains both contributed to the capital cost.

Having built the two homes, we now needed to fill them and provide the staff to look after the children. Finding the children was not hard but we asked the community to set up a committee with whom we could work to ensure a fair process of selection, and to manage the day to day running of the home.

Ulamaba Orphanage now has 24 kids happily living on-site under the benevolent and watchful eye of Mama Rose and her staff of 4. Each year we return to Ulamba with another Africamp group and add to the whole project. Toilets, showers, a generator, and of course hundreds of toys and books and donations which people bring in their luggage. Visiting groups of supporters and individuals come to stay for a time to lend a hand.

We also provide the runnings costs for staff and food and everything the children may need, from school uniforms to pens and new shoes. This costs us 67,500 Ksh per month (around £550.00).

Ulamba Orphanage is a big success story for Moving Mountains because we have kept a close link with the committee, the staff and the children. As a charity we are respected in the community because we have taken time to build the trust, largely through the efforts of Chris Little. We are sharing the responsibility and we have integrated the orphanages into the community at large by employing people, using the local schools and allowing local people to feel an ownership of the whole project. We believe this is good, productive support that is sustainable and relevant.

We would like to increase the number of children, and the staff, to the full capacity of 80. For this we need additional finances.

How you can help:
Donate to the monthly upkeep of the orphanage which will allow us to add more children.
Come and help out in the orphanage and your payment for living there will go towards the orphanage costs.

Some children we support through primary school and even secondary school are clearly not academically inclined and we thought about ways to help these young people. They still had potential and much to offer to society, the problem for them was opportunity. Stuck in a slum and trapped by poverty, they were powerless to do anything.

We thought about ways to help these young people, some of whom we had spent considerable money putting through school and assisting their families. It seemed a waste of money if some of them were unable to go to college because their marks were poor. Clearly many of these children also had psychological problems, not least because of the emotional trauma of growing up in the slums where police brutality is an everyday occurrence and survival is a daily challenge.

We were keen to look beyond the idea that education was the key; obviously literacy and the three R's are important but what of the child who will never get to become a doctor or an accountant or a lawyer. The truth is that there is a vast majority who, despite basic education, will continue to struggle in a world of high unemployment, social prejudice and no welfare state support system.

Moving Mountains combined a programme of annual building projects with the idea of training youngsters who were more interested in 'blue collar' work and then giving them work. We concentrated on the children we had put through school and were now idle, waiting for something to do.

Francis Kioni, our project manager, was the one we approached to manage the training of these young people. We agreed a figure for their monthly salary, which replaced the financial support we had been giving them. Suddenly they were not getting a 'freebie' for rent and food, but they were earning a salary.

Almost instantly we noticed an increase in self-esteem, pride and enthusiasm for life. The Community Action Team, as we called it, was travelling the country in our trucks and renovating schools, clinics, orphanages and houses. Communities thanked them and they felt proud of their work. In the slums they had standing. They interacted with wazungus (white people) and felt confident to communicate and socialise (sometimes this gets out of hand and we have to draw the lines of discipline since most of these youngsters lack social skill and experience).

CAT has been an instant success, and a logical one too. People complain of breeding reliance on handouts and aid, and obviously when a child is 6 years old you have to give the money in this way. But when a girl or boy is 18 they want to earn money and gain respect as an adult. In African culture this is vital.

CAT builds a bore hole with MM volunteers at Nyasidhi School

How you can help:
Raise £750 for a CAT project. Part of the money will go to the monthly cost of running CAT (£250) and the balance will go to the project itself. You can come out and take part if you want! Individuals or small groups can apply. We do one project a month.

Some centres we build and some we support and renovate, depending on circumstances. In each case we work with the local council and education board to establish the needs.

Ulamba Community Centre is part of the whole Ulamba site where we have a clinic and two orphanages. The Centre is used for any sort of local meeting, educational visits and so on. We plan that it will become a vocational training centre where people can learn skills like tailoring.


Embu Rescue Centre was built on church land but was sadly neglected and received minimal support from the local council and occasional well wishers. We decided to inject money and support into it and, in the past two years, it has become a very active drop-in centre for up to 85 street kids. We provide a feeding programme and counselling, plus we have integrated the kids into a Black Cats team which has been very successful.

More recently we have found houses for 8 of the street kids and set them up in business, selling vegetables at the local market. The local municipal council has seen our work and is very enthusiastic, even going so far as offering us our own land in 2008, to where we can physically move the building!


In Mombasa we are working with a lady called Christine Mumo who has been running a home for several years called Jambo Jipya. she looks after about 65 kids who are out of school, on the streets or without family. Her work encompasses a host of needs for kids in the area and she provides basic education, food and a place to sleep. Mostly she provides a strong role model to be a 'good citizen' and counsels the children much as a mother would.

Playground at Ulamba

The future has many possibilities for all three locations:
In Ulamba we want to provide vocational equipment and courses and we need help with things like sewing machines and teaching aids.
In Embu we need financial support for the business grants we offer and the feeding programme itself, as well as future help with the additional kids who come every day for something to do eg football, counselling, and even some basic learning.
In Mombasa we need help with the feeding programme and the education of some of the kids who could perform well in school.

In 2006 we decided to make a radical addition to the role of the charity, something which is rarely done by other charities working in the youth sector. We decided to give young people jobs.

During his years working in the slums of Kenya, founder Gavin Bate found again and again that many of the young people he took from the streets into schools and back to their homes had in fact been schooled but were unable to take their life any further. They had minimal social skills, had no permanent address needed for getting a job, were lacking in self-esteem and quite incapable of paying for a vocational course or conducting themselves well in a job interview. Even in their own eyes they were unemployable. Many of them took to begging or stealing or joining gangs.

Gavin felt strongly that it was far better to help a smaller number of people in a committed way, all the way into adulthood and self-sufficiency, rather than sponsor a large number of children only part of the way. This principle has become one of the over-riding reasons that Moving Mountains is so successful, and so unusual.

Because Adventure Alternative has become a large safari company, it is able to employ many young people. In fact it was another principle of Gavins' that the company he started in Kenya would eventually provide work for some of the young people who were brought up through the charity. The challenge now is to take that principle and invite other tour companies to follow it.



Similarly as the charity grows it needs to employ people to help run it. Who better to employ than the very people who were beneficiaries of the charity in the first place?

Now Moving Mountains is not just a charity that gives money, it is an organisation that gives employment and careers. It is not a charity that breeds reliance on aid, because it encourages and teaches young people how to get internships and jobs. We believe this is the future of 'good aid'.
For young people who are clearly not academically inclined we started the Community Action Team, an idea which is described on another page.

How you can help:
Come on safaris and holidays with Adventure Alternative to Kenya. Your staff will be qualified guides, cooks, mechanics, drivers and helpers; all of them will have come through Moving Mountains.

At Muthurwa School in Nairobi we have been running a successful feeding programme for the past three years, costing 46,500Ksh per month (around £400.00). We set up trade agreements with suppliers and the school purchased porridge and tea and bread for every child every day. We also provided money for lunches for many children who we supported and paid for one of the mothers to come in and prepare the meals.

We also have a feeding programme in Embu at the Rescue Centre and have built a kitchen and paid for a Mama to prepare the meals for up to 100 street kids every single day.

In Mombasa we put money towards a smaller feeding programme at Jambo Jipya Home, for about 65 children every day.


Feeding children at school is not part of the Governments remit. Many arrive at 7am on an empty stomach and by 10am they are starving and sleepy. Most fall asleep in class. By feeding the kids and providing tea and biscuits at breaktime it not only keeps them awake, it encourages them to come to school. The prospect of food is as strong as the desire for education!


We also provide money every month to many families for food to help keep their family well fed.