Day 25: 20 years of Little Gestures!
2024 was the year we marked the 20th anniversary of A Little Gesture. It’s hard to believe that 20 years have passed since the day I first arrived in Mozambique, believing that after four months I would return with a story to tell and little else. In 2004, Mozambique shaped the destiny of my life and since then it has given me a connection and a desire to do something that led to the creation of A Little Gesture A Great Help.
If you asked me 20 years ago what this message would be today, I wouldn’t be able to say… I wouldn’t be able to say that there are more than 3,500 children we impact every day. I wouldn’t know that we have 900 children individually sponsored by godparents who support their studies and food in their families. I couldn’t tell you that we would be operating 3 pre-schools, that we would already have university students. I couldn’t tell you that we’d have 2,500 children in 2 schools eating every day. That we would serve these children more than 500,000 meals a year. That we would have a team of 50 people in Mozambique, including technicians, cooks and educators.
If you asked me, I couldn’t have guessed that the 20th anniversary year would be one of the most difficult years A Little Gesture has ever faced. With staff retirements and a lot of restructuring, it was a year in which we had to stop thinking about what we couldn’t do and focus our daily action on the fundamental pillars of our operations: focus on the beneficiary and the programmes we have in place, focus on the sponsor and the quality of the relationship we seek to promote, sustainable fundraising for our multi-year programmes and compliance with our regulatory obligations. There were several moments when we wavered, especially in the first six months, because we knew we wanted to do more. And these priorities were essential to keeping our focus on where A Little Gesture comes from, on changing every life, on what we can do and not on what we leave behind.
This year, we spent a lot of time restructuring the way we think and act, documenting and standardising processes, setting clear objectives for all projects. It may sound boring, but it was actually essential in allowing us to re-learn how to focus on the beneficiary and re-evaluate what we really can and want to do for each child, each family, each community.
- Feeding, because nutrition is the basis of our intervention to support the most disadvantaged.
- Educate, because we believe that it is through education that we can break the cycle of poverty
- Balance, because we want to guarantee access and equality for our girls over time
- Accelerate, because we want to give every young person the tools to become an active citizen in their community
- Empower, because we want intervention in the empowerment of families to be part of our action that starts with the child
These 5 pillars have been essential for evaluating each project, for reviewing every piece of information we’ve collected, for establishing activities and objectives, for sitting down and assessing our presence throughout the child’s life. With them, we know that 2025 promises to be a year of strength and dedication, an empowered team focused on turning small gestures into big help.
In 2024 we didn’t celebrate 20 years as we had dreamed. But today, I’m proud to ask everyone who’s with us to make a virtual toast to everything we’ve achieved over the last 20 years and in this difficult year.
Together for the children,
Sara