Youth Empowerment for the Special Needs in Nairobi

Hi, am raising funds to enable us set up a place where the young men and women with special needs can work and earn a living and create a career instead of sitting home and being cared for like small children. My wife and I met eight years ago working at Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi as play & speech therapist and occupation therapist and clinic clown. The young children we were handling at the beginning are now grownups however they are still being treated like children even though most of them have developed and could be engaged doing something else during the day also to give their families time to attend to other things, children or work since there constantly has to be someone staying with them at home.

My wife's oldest brother who is autistic as been living with us for 3 years now and we have managed to engage him working at our small car wash business where he has improved and now very independent living in his own house nearby.The inspiration and the level of achievement and relief we have felt from this has inspired us to start reaching out to other young people with this kind of conditions and try to help by setting up a small supermarket combined with a grocery and a car wash in our neighborhood and employ the young adults specifically with special needs to work in the supermarket, grocery, farm, gate-keeping, bakery, car wash and in the gift shop. When the young adults are well trained and ready, we will help deploy them in related jobs and with the help of our networks e.g deploying car washers to petrol stations e.t.c

Our neighbor is very supportive and has offered to rent out her house and compound which would host all these activities. To add up the revenue to support all these, we also are going to be doing all our therapy sessions for the younger children in there for the paying clients that we work with currently.

The parents of the children and our colleagues are very supportive of this and are helping raise funds and volunteer when we start in November, 2018.

This idea has been in her mind for a long time and making this happen will go a long way in transforming lives of many people and availing opportunities to the most neglected members of our society here in Kenya. The initial plan was to start with two activities but with availability of enough capital and moral support we can even go bigger than our original target.

The funds are going to used in paying for rents for the facilities which will be given to us at relatively fair prices as a contribution also from the owner, registration of the enterprise and other regulations, purchasing the starting stock and setting up the garden for vegetables, branding and buying two small pumps machines for the car wash and fittings adjustments for the center.

We already started fundraising through friends and colleagues but more support is needed that's why I come to you to ask for support to achieve this dream and get it started by the end of November, 2018.

This will mean the world to us and to all the beneficiaries involved it's our wish that in future we expand to other remote regions of the country and also inspire other entrepreneurs to venture in this moral way to make change in other peoples' lives.

Thank you very much,

Beatrice and Joel.