This year gave them more spaces and more programs to experience joy and silliness and the freedom to let go. It is hard to quantify in an Impact Report what that exactly means. But we can tell you what it looks like. It looks like greeting every outing with enthusiasm and earnest curiosity. It looks like our kids not thinking twice about digging in with cow dung and mud to smear a house. It looks like late nights of completing puzzles at the computer camp and long afternoons in the office settling into a good book.
Read our annual Ajiri Foundation Impact Report here.
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And with each of these rituals, in each of these small moments over the next few weeks, our heart aches. We want our Ajiri scholars to feel these small moments of love as they go to school. We want there to be someone to drop them off at school and embarrass them with a hug. We want there to be someone waiting at home to talk to them. We want them to feel frustrated when their parents try to help with their physics homework.
Angela, Wesley, and Damacline were now hopelessly off course. They had managed to scale that final fence and were walking down toward a forest. I wanted to run to them, set them on the right course, explain scale and direction and how they should put the compass on the map. But instead I watched them from the top of the hill. They were now making pretend owl calls to each other, quite literally hooting from one group to another and then bursting into laughter.
See, there is this tip-toeing around issues in business. No company should align itself too "political" for fear of alienating customers. But to have opinions and emotions—well, that's just human. As a society, we've become too corporatized—too sanitized to believe that companies shouldn't have a voice. Of course politics affect our business. Tariffs on tea! The war in Iran means higher costs of shipping our tea. The elimination of USAID and its direct impact on our community in Kenya. But more so than something directly affecting us and our business, we still care about policies that affect our neighbors and people across the world.
Kate Holby
Author