Our Story

In early 2007 a group of people from California travelled to Nairobi, Kenya and saw firsthand the devastation caused by poverty and disease to the thousands of children scraping out an existence in the slum of Huruma. We had seen it from a distance and experienced similar poverty and disease travelling across the Mexico border into some of the small pueblos where children and families struggled to put food on the table, receive medical care or complete an education.  Even as we journeyed to San Francisco to catch our flights to Kenya, we knew that the Central Valley of California where we lived was ranked one of the nation’s highest regions of people living below the federal poverty line with significant food insecurity.  So, in a pickup truck travelling to help Kenyans was birthed the concept of forming a children’s charity that would reach and help children around the globe, wherever we could find reliable and effective indigenous leaders who could use the resources we could bring. We called it When I Grow Up because it centers on giving children a different future, a future that involve hope, a future where their dreams can be reached.