We are excited to announce that Crossroads Springs Africa (CSA) and Friends of Kakamega (FoK) have joined together as one, combining our programs and resources under the umbrella of a new organization named Friends of Kenya Rising (FKR).
As you have undoubtedly noticed, both organizations have been working closely over the last few years. Both CSA and FoK share programs and staff on the ground in Kenya, and they share the mission of assisting students and their families in Western Kenya as they rise above poverty. On the ground in Kenya, their programs are already almost indistinguishable; they are two U.S. funding sources for one Kenyan organization. Between them, they currently support more than 350 students in their primary, secondary, and college studies, and we also assist these students’ families, over 1,000 people, through farm support and other family-focused programming.
CSA and FoK were both founded close to two decades ago as a response to the overlapping crises of stubbornly deep poverty, HIV/AIDS, rapidly growing numbers of orphans, and financial barriers to schooling. CSA’s program to support the education of extremely needy children was initiated in Hamisi, while FoK’s began in Kakamega Town only 20 miles north of Hamisi. Students from both organizations hail from all over the region, and there is no real geographic difference. We are already one, and we now are making it official by joining together.
In 2004, CSA co-founder Alison Hyde and FoK founder Sukie Rice began to share joys and challenges of doing very similar work. Five years ago, after the Kenyan government had fully stepped up to ensure primary education for all, Alison contacted Sukie to tell her that CSA was working on a change of focus toward secondary education. FoK then worked with CSA to facilitate our plan of assisting needy students so they could access otherwise unaffordable high school education. We’ve only grown closer since.
We’ve been working on this in the background for more than a year. FoK founder Sukie, in a letter that she wrote two months before her passing this July, said that “as [our] programs developed it became clear that they were doing the same thing
