Hi Church,

An update on the operation of Havillah Pathway from Will Richards (chairman of Havillah Pathway UK and a member of BFC)

Dear BFC,

We have seen the Havillah go through some tremendous improvements over these past seven years, compared to the conditions Milly and the children were first in when students from The Weald visited it in 2013, and these improvements have been partly down to the support BFC has given over the years.

This blog is to let everyone at BFC know about some developments at the Havillah and a conclusion that the trustees of Havillah Pathway UK have drawn as a result of these developments.  You will know that Mark Raes and I established the Havillah Pathway UK as a registered charity a few years ago and that the main aim of this charity has been to support the work of the Havillah Children’s Home in Kenya. The trustees and I have decided, as at our last meeting a few days ago, to formally close the Havillah Pathway UK charity and to inform the Charities Commission that we will no longer be operating.  

This decision was not taken lightly but I am pleased to say that we are in this situation mostly due to the success of other sponsors.  When I first became involved with the Havillah Children’s Home, Milly had no formal income of any kind and she was solely supported by anything she could make in Kenya coupled with anything that supporters like yourselves in the UK were able to provide.  After we became involved, a team from Germany also visited the Havillah and have since formed a German charity to also support Milly and her work.  As the years have gone on, their support has far outstripped ours and we are now in a position where we only provide a smaller fraction of the total running costs of the Havillah.  We find that we are in a situation where there are now two registered charities who are both supporting one organisation in Kenya, and as you can imagine, this leads to various potential administrative problems such as deciding which charity meets which expense.  Due to these issues and the fact that we are providing the smaller income stream, the trustees and I have therefore decided that it is time to step back and enable the German charity to enhance and further their fundraising without the added complication of liaising with us.  

The immediate question that comes to mind is “will the children suffer as a result of this?” and our confident answer to this is that they really won’t as, as mentioned above, we were only providing a small portion of their revenue stream.  The efforts of the Germans can be enhanced by releasing them from the extra administration of working alongside us and we wish them the best with their efforts.

We want to thank you for your support of the Havillah Children’s Home. Your support has made a huge difference to Milly’s work and we are pleased that another team is now taking this work on.  

Please do get in touch if you have any further questions.

Will Richards