Adventure Alternative

Moving Mountains

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www.movingmountains.org.uk

 

Update 2006 for the latest information on the work of Moving Mountains...

Background

Gavin Bate founded Moving Mountains charity in 2002 after working in the slums of Nairobi since 1991 and raising money through his expeditions and articles for a multitude of projects and child sponsorships. The charity was created out of a need to formalise everything as the commitments grew. It is now an efficient, relevant and tightly controlled organisation with an annual spend of around £80,000.00.

Gavin has had experience with a number of aid agencies in the past including Medecins Sans Frontieres, World Food Programme and UNICEF. He has also been working in the lower Khumbu region of Nepal and in Niger, where the charity has interests. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the charity is that it is financially supported by Adventure Alternative which currently covers almost all the overheads and administrative costs, amounting to around £20,000.00 per annum. It is this relationship between the charity and the company - more of a corporate policy - which enables the Trust to state quite unequivocably that almost every penny of all donations goes to the beneficiaries. The current percentage of administrative percentage for 2005 is 4% for public liability insurance and bank charges.

Moving Mountains is a Trust registered in Northern Ireland (XR62512) and has six Trustees, all of whom either work for Adventure Alternative now or have been to Kenya, Nepal or Niger through the company. They are: Chris Little (Secretary), Andrew MacDonald (Treasurer), Helena Ventham, Katie Brown and Susan Birkett.

Moving Mountains Kenya

In 2005 Gavin set up a seperate charity in Kenya as an NGO (non-governmental organisation) which is called Moving Mountains Kenya. It has three Trustees who are Rose Gathirimu, Peter Kariuki and Kelly Kioko (all ex-street kids and also Directors of Gavin's company in Kenya which is called Africampers). Intrinsic to it's constitution is the financial link between it and Moving Mountains Trust in the UK, which is stated as the official donor. All monies bound for Kenya go through the NGO and the UK Trustees control the expenditure but also rely on the Kenyans to a) manage the funds and spend them, and b) advise on future projects.

This development was critical to Gavin's plans. He believed strongly that the money being donated through the Trust should be spent by Kenyans, and specifically Kenyans like Rosie, Peter and Kelly who were the proteges of the programme which began in 1991.

A Style of Charity which works...

A lot of people have said “The way Moving Mountains is run and the principles behind it are so refreshingly different to other charities”. This is very encouraging ! Moving Mountains operates under the tenet that charity and commerce can work together, that ‘charity’ is not about just handing out money, but empowering people. Money, while important, is a tool to assist and not an end in itself to poverty.

Not only that but all our clients, the teachers and the medical students and the people who visit as volunteers, all contribute to the charity. Every time Adventure Alternative sends out a client to Kenya or Nepal, it makes a donation to the school or the hospital or orphanage where that person goes. This drip feed idea has had phenomenal results in the past 5 years. The local institutions have made wonderful use of the money with their own committees and become the architects of their own success and development. In some cases entire schools have been pulled back from the brink from utter bankruptcy and degradation, and are now fully functional and moving towards the future with clear ambition and business plans in mind.

When there is a need for a particular renovation or new building, the charity steps in with the capital investment and the workforce, often with our huge Africamp Expeditions or visiting groups of fundraising volunteers.

With so many years of experience, Gavin set up Moving Mountains (and Adventure Alternative) specifically to tackle issues of poverty and child rehabilitation by understanding the system which operates in the local area, and applying economic principles and carefully injected money into the right place. This meant understanding local bureacracy, the psychology behind Aid as a concept, the minutiae of family life in areas of deep poverty, the language and finally the best way to implement a procedure which would be acceptable to all. This has taken 15 years of social and cultural research; the upshot being that Moving Mountains now has a system that really works, that does the following:

1) Doesn't have huge overheads because the Company pays for it

2) Is managed and operated by young enthusiastic, educated Kenyans (in Kenya) who came from a background of poverty and understand perfectly how to approach issues at a grassroots level

3) Relies on the Company and its' clients to supplement the funding through corporate donations that drip feed into the system

4) Is efficient, relevant and devoid of corruptive influences.

5) Involves the donors because they are actively coming out to the project areas

 

Gavin: "I confess that nowadays I am filled with overwhelming pride when I visit Kenya. The children I started working with twelve years ago are now confident, educated young people with a future. And yet to be honest the amount of money it has taken to get them this far has been relatively small; the school fees over the years were not expensive by our standards. Far more important has been their growth as people, their moral values, their sense of belonging and integrity. They have become decent people. To meet them, to talk to them, you would never think they once mugged tourists, sniffed glue and ran riot on the streets of Nairobi.
And I have noticed something; an exciting and valuable lesson which is becoming apparent now. I hoped it would develop but to see it in practise is very special. It is the ripple effect. The new children coming under the wing of MM can see very well their possible future in the lives of the older ones; and that sense of hope comes from them and not just from us. Those same principles that I tried to instil all those years ago, are now being emulated by the Kenyans themselves. And it’s working ! I can say with hand on heart that we really are changing lives, and that now those first kids are changing the lives of others.

 

So can you help?

We have capital projects that sound, and are, ambitious and grand. You can help there by coming on trips like Africamp. And if you’ve already been on that then maybe encourage someone else to join up, and then come back yourself to do something different ! We can accommodate just about anything that you want to do.

Climbing Kilimanjaro for Moving Mountains is also something you could do or get others to do. We incorporate time in Nairobi to see all this work we are doing, to meet the kids and see the projects. It can be life changing for many people. And putting faces to names is always a lovely experience for both sides.

But it’s the small things that matter, really it is. Fridah needs 40p to catch a bus to school and without it, no school that day. She’s going to secondary in January and she’s already on a repeat year at primary, so every day is important for her. Every month we need to find around £3000 to pay for all those small things.

So, thank you for reading this. And Thank you for any assistance you have given so far. People like to feel they are ‘doing their bit’ and we want people to know that we are really working to not just do something, but to do it in the right way.