“You are always part of the community. Your [place] keeps changing, from being a vulnerable receipt of aid, to someone who initiates, to someone who empowers, and I think I have just changed roles over time…but I have always been part and a contributing member of the community at each stage.”
-Mitchell Lutaaya Mukasa
Village Care Initiatives
A consulting agency for villages and neighborhoods to improve community care
Mitchell Lutaaya Mukasa plays many roles, but first and foremost he considers himself a Christian pastor. He is the founder of Impact for Jesus Ministries, a church with a strong focus on social transformation. He is also the overseer of a pastoral network, the Makindye East Pastors’ Initiatives, and a founding member of the Children at Risk Network (CRANE), an organization that connects community care providers across Kampala. Finally, he is the country director of Village Care Initiatives, an NGO that consults with villages and neighborhoods across Eastern Africa, to help them envision and enact their own community care projects.
Meet the Caregiver
The Need for Village Care
Before being part of the team that founded Village Care Initiatives, Mitchell Mukasa had done lots of NGO work, but often been dissatisfied with their typical models:
My entire working life has been with the nonprofit, non-governmental organizations, and the first two that I ever worked with, it was a typical NGO- you raise funds from the West, and you come to a distributing center. You provide it to the orphanages, streets children, women’s groups…and I realized that, well, we had good intentions, and our program was successful at a time, because we had about a hundred children from the slums go to school, but there was something in the community that was lucking-the transformation of the community.
As an example, Mitchell talked about programs that sponsor one child from a family, but do not directly engage the parents, or other members of the family. This seemingly charitable model would often create distance between the child and their family, and fail to improve the lives of those around them.
To try something different, therefore, Mitchell started inviting parents in the community together for discussion:
I thought we must start reaching out to the parents, and with a small weekly women’s group, I just asked a simple question: “what are your dreams for your life and your family? How do you think you are going to achieve that?” “What do you have?” So, it grew from there. Women shared their aspirations, and we started looking at different things we could do together. We didn’t invest anything else in that program other than time to be there, and the church provided the space like this room.
The Village Care Model
Eventually Mitchell met others from Kenya and the United States who were similarly frustrated with the typical NGO model. Together they built on his practice of creating spaces to ask questions and discuss solutions, billing themselves as a “helping organization” or consulting group. In this video, Mitchell describes their unique approach.
For more information and to support Village Care Initiatives, visit their website.