October 2023. Nairobi, Kenya.

I was standing at a school in Nairobi with Michael Maingi—now our Vice President—listening as he explained the reality of the surrounding slum. But what stopped me wasn’t the poverty. It was what he said about the men.

Michael told me that in this community, a “wise man”—someone others look up to—might be in his late 20s or early 30s. Not because he’s accomplished, but because there simply aren’t older men to look to. No elders. No fathers. No models of endurance, responsibility, or hope.

The men Michael described weren’t lazy or indifferent. They were resigned.

They believed the hand they were dealt was final. That survival—not leadership—was the goal. And that mindset was leading to drugs, alcohol, crime, and the quiet abandonment of families. Many of these men had grown up without fathers and now they were becoming absent fathers themselves - not out of malice but out of hopelessness.

That broke something open in me.

Later, on the final day of that trip, I was climbing Mount Longonot with friends. As our guide explained how the Great Rift Valley cuts through Kenya—stretching far beyond what we could see—I felt God impress something unmistakable on my heart:

These men are your brothers. You don’t fix them. You walk alongside them.

I had walked through Mathare Slum and had seen men sitting in survival mode—not physically starving, but mentally exhausted. Men who carried the belief that no one respected them, no one needed them, and no one would notice if they disappeared.

I couldn’t unsee that.
And I couldn’t come home unchanged.

That was the moment this work became unavoidable.