Long before our certificate of registration was issued in October 2020, the footbridge connecting Gituamba to Kasarani town already had a long, informal history of community-led maintenance, residents pooling small amounts of money whenever a plank rotted through or a handrail gave way, without any formal organization behind the effort.
Several of our founding members first came to know each other not through any structured meeting, but by showing up, separately, to the same informal repair days over the years, a shared instinct to fix the crossing whenever it failed rather than wait indefinitely for a formal county upgrade that never quite arrived.
When the group formally registered as a Community Based Organization in 2020, naming it after the bridge itself was, in a real sense, the only choice that made sense: it was the literal, physical thing that had first brought neighbors together to solve a shared problem collectively.
“Long before we had a name, a constitution, or a certificate, we had a bridge that kept breaking and a group of neighbors who kept showing up to fix it. Everything else the organization does grew out of that same instinct.”
— Founding member
Since formal registration, the organization's work has expanded well beyond the bridge itself, into education, environment, women's economic empowerment, and health, but the footbridge remains both our namesake and an active program area, most recently the subject of an emergency handrail repair in August 2026 and a drainage advocacy petition in November 2025.
We share this history because it explains something important about how we work: we tend to respond to problems residents can see and feel directly, rather than starting from an abstract program plan and looking for a community to apply it to.
Your donation or volunteer hour goes directly into work like the story above — not overhead.
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