My name is Lauren and I am fundraising for Mum's Love Children's Home, a registered child institution in Kenya, ran by Alice Mwende Kanini, and home to 44 children.

In January-February 2025, I spent 6 weeks in Soweto, Nairobi, volunteering primarily at Smart Angels Community Centre, the education program run by Mum's Love. Smart Angels teaches over 200 vulnerable children from the community up to age 11, with plans to expand to educate the older children as required. The monthly cost to Mum's Love to provide this schooling is $20 (£15) per child.

In addition to the orphanage and school, Mum's Love also run a Street Families Feeding Program. This provides breakfast and lunch 6 days a week to over 150 people in the community. In addition, they offer mentorship to help build a life free from drugs and violence. Many of the people who benefit from these services have children who attend Smart Angels.

You can read the complete story of all the amazing work they do at Mum's Love via this link to their website: https://mumslovech.co.ke/

My initial goal is to raise £500 pounds. A current ambition that Mum's Love have is to be able to purchase some laptops for the children to use at school and establish online learning lessons. This is a fantastic way to expand the education the children are already receiving, increasing their access to their world beyond their current situation and fuelling their ambitions for the future. One laptop costs around 15,000 Ksh (£90): at our current goal, they would have enough money to be able to buy five and still have some money to go towards the maintenance of their projects.

At the orphanage, the money will go towards ensuring the children's basic needs are continually met, providing items such as:

At Smart Angels Community Centre, money raised can go towards the following:

For their Street Families Feeding Program, you donations will help to provide:

All of this lists above are non-exhaustive. Additionally, Mum's Love are actively looking to repair their television, which has been broken for over a year. It would be incredible if we could raise enough money so that they could use some of the funds to fix this, and provide the children access to entertainment that I have seen they really yearn for.

Here are a couple of photos of some of the people I was lucky enough to meet and work with during my time in Soweto. I am so grateful to have gotten to know them - my life is forever changed:

As a fun way for me to promote Mum's Love and this fundraiser, I will be completing a different challenge for each of the 30 days of September 2025. I will be documenting these for you all to follow over on my Instagram stories. There is also a video posted on my main feed explaining all about the launch of this fundraiser and my time working with Mum's Love Children's Home.

My Instagram: @laurengraceking

You can also follow Mum's Love on Instagram: @mumslovechildrenshome

Thank you in advance for all of your kind donations. I have some friends across the world who will be very grateful.