Posted by 2024 was the year that marked the 20 years since A Little Gesture was created. It is hard to believe that it has been 20 years since the day I first arrived in Mozambique, believing that 4 months on I would be back with a story to tell and nothing else. In 2004, Mozambique changed the course of my life and since then created a connection and a will to do something that led to the creation of A Little Gesture A Great Help.
If you asked me 20 years ago what this message would be like today, I would not know. I would not know we would be impacting more than 3500 children every day. I would not know that that we’d have 900 individually sponsored children, whose sponsors support their schooling and nutrition at home. I would not know that we would be operating 3 pre-schools and even have over 20 university students. I would not know we would be feeding 2500 children across 2 schools every day. I would not know we would feed these children over half a million meals in a year. That we would have a team of 50 on the ground, between field officers, cooks and teachers.
If you asked me, I also would not have guessed that the year we passed the 20-year mark would also be one of the most difficult years we have ever faced. With team losses and a fair amount of restructuring, this was a year we could no longer think about what we were not able to do, but rather focus our daily actions in key pillars for our operations: focus on the beneficiary and the programs we have going, focus on the sponsor and the quality of the relationship we seek to promote, sustainable fundraising for our multi-year programs and keeping with our regulatory requirements. There were several moments when we hesitated, especially in the first few months, because we desperately wanted to do more. But these priorities were essencial for us to focus on the essence of the creation of A Little Gesture, affecting each life in the best possible way and not being dragged by what we can not do.
This year, we dedicated a lot of time to restruturing our way of acting and thinking, documenting and standardizing processes, re-establishing clear goals across all projects. It may sound boring, but in fact it was key to help us re-learn the focus on the beneficiary and re-evaluate what we indeed want and can do for each child, each family, each community:
- Feed, because nutrition is at the base of our intervention with the unpriviliged child
- Educate, because we believe that education is the key to break the cycle of poverty
- Balance, because we want to ensure equal access and equality over time to our girls
- Accelerate, because we want to provide tools for each young person to become an active member of their community
- Empower, because we want our intervention with the families to be part of our action
These 5 pillars were essential to complete an evaluation of each project, to review each piece of information we collect, to establish daily activities and goals, to sit and evaluate our presence across the lifecycle of each beneficiary. With these, we know 2025 promises to be a year full of strength and dedication, with an empowered and focused team, geared to transform little gestures into a great help.
In 2024, we did not celebrate our 20-year anniversary the way we had dreamed. But today, I proudly ask all those that are with us to raise a virtual glass to everything we have achieved in the last 20 years and in this difficult year.
Together for the children!