This is one of our earliest posts — written in the first months of Ubuntu Village’s life as an organization. We are keeping it here because someone once told us that beginnings matter. That the way you start tells the truth about what you intend. This is how we started: with a child in Uganda, a relationship that began in 2017, and the conviction that community is not a program. It is a promise.
How It Began: Kalisizo, 2017
Owen lives in Kalisizo, a town in Rakai District in southern Uganda. It sits close to the Tanzanian border, in a region that has known more than its share of loss — HIV/AIDS moved through Rakai in the 1980s and 1990s with devastating force, leaving behind a generation of children growing up without one or both parents. The structural conditions that follow that kind of loss do not disappear quickly. They settle into communities and shape what becomes possible for children born decades later.
Owen was one of those children. Not a statistic — a child with a specific face and a specific need and a specific community around him that was doing its best with what it had. Ubuntu Village first connected with Owen in 2017, before we had a fully formed organization, before we had a name that most people recognized. What we had was the conviction that connection was possible and that doing something, however imperfect, was better than doing nothing.
The relationship didn’t begin with a program or an application or a formal partnership agreement. It began the way most real things begin — with a person who knew another person, with a story shared, with a small act of showing up that created the expectation of more showing up. That is, in essence, the entire Ubuntu Village model: show up, stay, keep the promise.
What It Means to Show Up Across an Ocean
Ubuntu Village is a Harlem-based organization. Our roots are in East Harlem, in the African diaspora in the United States, in the lived experience of communities that have been separated from ancestral home by centuries of history and miles of ocean. And yet from very early on, we understood that Ubuntu — I am because we are — does not stop at the border of any neighborhood or any nation. The village is wherever the people are. The obligation of community extends as far as you can reach, and then a little further.
Owen’s situation is not unusual in Uganda, or across East Africa, or across a world in which millions of children are growing up without the parental support that determines so much of what becomes possible. What is unusual is when a community decides — across geography, across culture, across the enormous distance between a Harlem storefront and a school in Kalisizo — that this child is ours. That his education is our responsibility. That his dentist visit is something we will make happen.
That decision is what Ubuntu Village was built to make. Not as charity. Not as rescue. As the recognition that the village was always supposed to extend this far, and that the only thing that prevented it was the history that separated us. We are, slowly and imperfectly, closing that distance.
What Partnership Looked Like in Practice
School fees. That is where we started. In Uganda, public primary education officially became free in 1997, but the costs that remain — uniforms, materials, examination fees, meals — are still enough to push children out of classrooms. Secondary school is a different matter entirely. Without fees covered, secondary education is simply not possible for most families in Kalisizo. Ubuntu Village’s support of Owen began with ensuring that school was not something he had to stop attending.
The dentist visit in the photo above is not incidental. It is a symbol of the kind of care that gets overlooked in conversations about “development” — the ordinary maintenance of a child’s body and health that families everywhere want to provide and that resource scarcity makes impossible. A dental appointment is not a luxury. It is what a community owes its children. Ubuntu Village made it happen because it was the right thing, and because we could.
This is not a story about transformation or rescue. Owen did not need to be saved. He needed a community with enough resources and enough reach to stand beside the community already around him in Kalisizo. That is what we tried to be. That is what we are still trying to be.
“He needed a community with enough resources and enough reach to stand beside the community already around him. That is what we tried to be.”
The village was always supposed to extend this far.
Owen’s story is one of many — a young person who needed a community to show up, and one that did. Your support helps Ubuntu Village keep that promise for more children in Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, and across the diaspora.
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Related Reading
- ‣ Ubuntu Village Solar Power Initiative: Energy Access in Uganda
- ‣ What We Have Done: Ubuntu Village Program History 2016–2025
- ‣ Where Your Support Goes: How Ubuntu Village Puts Partnership into Practice
- ‣ The Unaccompanied Children of Nakuru, Kenya
Michele Mitchell is the Founder, President & CEO of Ubuntu Village Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit rooted in East Harlem, New York, with programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria. A writer, advocate, and community strategist working at the intersection of ancestral wisdom, public health, and community power, Michele leads Ubuntu Village’s work to center communities as the protagonists of their own healing. She writes from the conviction that science and spirit are complementary, that healing is relational, and that community is the medicine.
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