For the Good

08/05/2026

“We need both ways of knowing the world, Indigenous and Western, because together they create a fuller, more meaningful picture of reality.”- Dr. Gregory Cajete

Nanau and her grandmother Ester, pictured here, headline our summer 2026 fundraising campaign because they exemplify resilience —and the way many Maasai girls must walk in two worlds. Rescued by her Ester from an early arranged marriage at age 10, Nanau now attends school by day, with Ester’s blessing and dedicated support, wearing a school uniform and studying literature, English, and science. By evening, she returns to Ester’s to traditions that have shaped the Maasai for generations,learning to steward the land, speak her first language, and contribute to the good of the community.

Our Summer 2026 “Two Kinds of Classrooms: One Brighter Future” campaign is supporting Maasai women’s efforts to create a formal mentorship pathway for girls— and to contribute, for the first time, to the intensive cultural education that has traditionally been reserved for boys and passed down solely through men. Along with 40 other female elders, Ester met for a two-day long session last week to begin facilitating this process.

When Maasai women’s wisdom and girl’s perspectives are included in the traditional education that forms Maasai boys worldviews, ideas about equity begin to shift from within the culture itself. That’s the type of change that is likely to be truly lasting. And that’s why we’ve chosen to support this effort.

All donations to our Two Classrooms campaign through tomorrow, Thursday, August 6th will be matched 100% thanks to the generosity of several longtime partners. We hope you’ll consider joining this effort to spark a paradigm shift about Maasai girl’s value. Link to the campaign in our Profile. Asante sana 🙏to our community—and for your support.

07/09/2026

“There’s not a word yet for old friends who’ve just met.”- Jim Henson

Each journey to Kenya is a gift, a chance to reconnect in person with our incredible Kenyan staff, visit many of the girls and families we work on behalf of, and connect with beloved friends old and new. Director .anderson made a quick trip in June to visit the just completed new day secondary school in Olpalagilagi; celebrate two more classrooms at Leshuta Day Secondary School; and stop by for the groundbreaking of one more new day secondary school in the remote community of Ilkerin. Along the way she dropped on to visit an old friend—-the grandmother of our amazing supervisor (photo 📸2) and make a brand new one from the next generation - Team Angaza volunteer Charity and her sweet son Shadrack.( Photo 📸1)

05/22/2026

This quietly beautiful, powerful image by photographer and National Geographic Explorer at Large currently graces a two-story tall brick building on Telluride’s Main Street as part of Telluride . Titled “Well”, Ami photographed it in the arid landscape of Rajasthan, India, and captures an ancient stepwell.

Stepwells were architecturally intricate water reservoirs once found across India — created by digging deep into the ground to tap existing aquifers and help trap and conserve rainwater. For centuries they not only sustained entire communities with perennial water sources but also served as vital community gathering spaces. They were outlawed in the 19th century under British colonial rule and today, most of these intricate water collection systems stand dry. As they disappear, the people who rely on them must travel farther and farther for water.

Ami’s photo touches us deeply because she has become a friend to . And also because the challenge of water scarcity and its profound impacts on girls and women are becoming increasingly severe in the communities we serve.

We come to Mountainfilm each year because it is an annual infusion of hope. “There’s something about arriving in Telluride that rearranges your internal compass,” wrote this year’s Guest Director and fellow photographer Cristina Mittermeier (). It’s not just the stunning mountain landscape, it’s the community and in particular, this singular weekend which hosts the return of a tribe of filmmakers, climbers, activists, and changemakers who are doing the hard work—sometimes in the spotlight, other times unseen — to make a difference.

The theme of this year is evidence-based hope— something we are all in deep need of these days. Recently we’ve learned that many of these intricate designed stepwells are being restored and repaired across India thanks. In Jaipur, more than 25,000 people are now receiving freshwater from restored stepwells.

“Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up,” wrote the author David Orr. That’s what this festival reminds us of each year.

05/11/2026

“The world is full of women who have given their all to their children. Their stories rarely make the headlines.”- Brene Brown

The moms we know in Kenya mother in so many beautiful and diverse ways. Every one of them struggles from pre-dawn till night to make sure her family’s needs for water and firewood and sustenance are met and to make life better for her children.

What we find so beautiful is that often, women here struggle just as hard for other’s children as they do for their own. With a belief that all children are precious, but without a formal social safety net, Maasai women regularly take in and support the children of neighbors or relatives who are struggling due to severe poverty or conflict. Christine Mpoe, our Supervisor for the Naikarra region, and her husband Joseph adopted his niece - sweet Tajeuo (Photo 1) when she was just two years old after his brother-in-law rejected her and love her as their own; they also help support school fees for over 40 other village children and share precious rainwater from their own household tank with the most vulnerable nearby families during the dry season. Leah Koisa, our Team Angaza for remote Ilkerin, (Photo 2) helped organize local mothers into a self help/fundraising group to raise school fees for the most vulnerable local children. Ester (Photo 3) traveled in the middle of the night to Tanzania several years ago to rescue her then nine-year-old granddaughter from an arranged marriage (Photo 3) and dedicates her life to ensuring she gets to stay in school right along with her own sons. Mama Najma worked seven days a week to support her 10 children (Photo 4), fiercely fighting for her daughter’s rights to stay in school against significant pressure from relatives. Former Team Angaza Evelyn Sanau went to college after finishing her volunteer service with us to study Community Development, then returned home to launch the Imirishi Women’s Self Help Group- a group of mothers who are now fundraising strategies not just to send their children to primary school but to college.

To every mom out there, we see you. Thank you for fighting to make a better world for your daughters and sons.

03/08/2026

This International Women’s Day as our hearts remain heavy and too aware of the devastating harms being inflicted on women around the world, we also celebrate the many women of For the Good whose dedication, commitment, and passion change girls’ lives for the better in ways large and small everyday. We are grateful to be part of an organization that creates spaces where women are not just welcome but truly leading the way in nearly all aspects of our work. Here are just a few of their smiling faces.

Photo #1: Founder .anderson joins in an icebreaker game of Hokey Pokey during our first-ever day in the field in Kenya as an organization, October 2015. 📷 #2: Supervisor Christine Mpoe with her mom in Olderkesi. Christine beat seemingly insurmountable odds during her own childhood to stay in school, ultimately earning a university degree. She now oversees our programs in Olderkesi and continues to rescue girls from early marry in her personal life, a project she began while in college. During any given school semester she and her husband Joseph often house up to 8 children at a time who are not their own to keep them in school. 📷 #3: Longtime Loita region Team Angaza volunteer Ann Muntati has helped three different villages near her own open new ECD preschools, creating new access to education for several hundred children and counting. She often walks hours several days a week to do this work. 📷 #4: Stellah Koshal, Mercy Lemian and Elizabeth Mateu are just three of our rapidly expanding team of Team Angaza volunteers in the Olderkesi region who are now creating similar impact in school enrollments, pad distributions and health information as our longtime team in Loita. 📷 5: Longtime Programs/Operations Manager Millicent Garama, whose masterful facilitation work and huge heart have long served as the North Star to our work. ̇nternationalwomensday

03/04/2026

“The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you.” - B.B. King

Hello from Naikarra! These sweet faces are 14 of the 17 children newly enrolled at Bright Star Academy ECD preschool by our Team Angaza volunteer Stellah Koshal.

In many regions around the world women and girls have in many ways never been closer to equality —and at the same time never closer to losing it as more and more of the programs and systems developed to protect women and girls get rolled back and start failing. As we head into International Women’s Day this week we want to spotlight just a few of the incredible women on our team in Kenya who are working hard to ensure that Maasai girls keep moving towards equity —not away from it.

Stellah (2nd photo, pictured with two of her children ) is our Team Angaza volunteer for the Naikarra region. She wanted to be part of Team Angaza so she could become a change maker in her community. Sharp, keen and quietly observant, Stellah has already accomplished that goal: She has identified hundreds of out-of-school children in the region of Naikarra where she lives and worked with their parents to enroll them into ECDs and primary school. She also teaches basic sanitation and health and SRHR education to local girls during pad distributions and, late last year, she helped local women in her village organize into an empowerment/ self help group that’s fundraising for local children’s school fees and other needs. Her hope for Maasai girls futures is “to see them finish their education la and realize their dreams.” Last year she had another baby whom she named after out founder .anderson .

03/04/2026

Yes that IS our Executive Director .anderson about to kiss a friendly little chameleon in the mountains outside of Arusha, Tanzania, two weeks ago. Today is so here’s a fun, little-known behind-the-scenes fact: Both our founder (Kayce Anderson) and our communications director (Kate Lapides) were passionate wildlife and conservation nerds as a young women who studied Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado Boulder —though a decade apart.

Kayce went on to earn a doctorate in the same field at the University of California Davis and then continued on for a post doc— a long stretch of years when she happily spent an inordinate amount of time hitchhiking around the Ecuadorian Andes chasing butterflies and aquatic insects for her research on declining butterfly populations and climate change. Instead of seeing her background in an entirely different profession as a liability when she leapt from ecology to studying the problems that keep girls from school in Kenya 15 years ago she has always seen it as simply a different type of systems research — and an invaluable asset in that there may be no more important skill in International development work than the ability to listen deeply and keenly observe. “It’s humbling and healthy to remain a learner,” she noted in a 2019 interview in Roaring Fork Lifestyle magazine. “Having a learning mindset is incredibly important in development work, especially in a very different culture. In many ways it suited me well to be in that position because our work with communities is an equal exchange…we learn from each other.”

Kate was one ecology course and a final physics semester shy of her own ecology degree at CU Boulder when the impact of powerful photojournalism and the magic of a black and white print revealing itself in a darkroom tray sent her off on a major detour away from conservation. She headed off to a newspaper internship and later, contract photography for various NGOs + a lot of side gigs but remained ever passionate about conservation and is grateful to be dabbing a toe back in that world through her work with the incredible .

03/03/2026

02/26/2026

We’ve been quiet here on Instagram the past two months— a bit ironically because our U.S. staff has been out in the field in Kenya and Tanzania for much of this time, where we tend to experience a hundred frame-able moments of both incredible beauty and also, too often, heartbreaking pain every day. Often, it feels important to pause before sharing them so we can let their full import sink in and say something thoughtful. A more banal reality is that we’re also usually running around packing each day way too full trying to touch base with too many people and project details in regions where WiFi and network are sketchy. And on this trip also, the continued cruelty our country has been inflicting on lives at home and abroad seems to have left us a bit at a loss for words upon returning home.

The focus of our recent weeks in Kenya was exploring solutions to the severe water scarcity issues that affect several regions where we work and also expanding our Participatory Video (PV) projects, which teach the tools of video and media to people who too often don’t get to control the stories told about their own lives. The hope that is that the ability to share their fuller, truer narratives will reduce the negative consequences that tend to happen when the stories told about them by others are one-dimensional, stereotyped, and limiting.

The PV work our small crew in Olderkesi has been doing to date has been so inspiring to see. The same is true for the learning trajectory of our team in Loita; we spent a joyful week watching their delight as they finally got to shoot with a video camera and hear the magic of a voice amplified through lav mics and headphones during their first official interviews. And we we’ve been struck by how this reclaiming of narratives is — as antidote to the one-dimensional fictions created by others — in this moment in history— not just for Maasai girls who’ve been constrained by historical patriarchal systems for too long but for all of us around the world. Words do matter. Speaking truth to power that’s being misused— whether at the community or global level — is one of the most powerful ways to shift the narratives that harm us all.

12/30/2025

“Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom experience can instill in us.” - Hal Borland

As we reflect on 2025, we are filled with gratitude that we were able to continue to carry our mission forward in a year marked by global uncertainty — and profoundly saddened by the aid cuts that devastated the programs of so many peer organizations. Like many, we have stretched to respond where we could and worked to help bridge gaps that should never have existed.

Among our highlight reel from 2025 is the chance to finally celebrate the first new classroom built at the key new secondary school in Entasekera (Photos 2 and 3) and another nearing completion in remote Orpalagilagi (Photo 5); health trainings that are already improving outcomes in many of our partner communities; the doubling of our Team Angaza volunteers thanks to a generous grant from ; the launch of numerous women’s merry-go-rounds—community savings groups by many Team Angaza that are now fundraising for their children’s education; and the launch of an innovative video-based program to strengthen girls’ sense of empowerment and spark community-wide social change thanks to the generosity of another longtime partner.

As the year draws to a close, we also wish to honor three extraordinary board members whose service has shaped For the Good in lasting ways. After completing three consecutive terms, Cochran, Barbara Freeman, and are stepping into new adventures. Their grounded leadership helped guide us through a global pandemic, navigate significant government policy shifts in Kenya, and thoughtfully scale our programs in 2023. We are enormously grateful for their wisdom and dedication.

On behalf of every girl whose life expanded because of your generosity in 2025, thank you for believing in—and investing in—our work. We look forward to what we can continue to build together in the year ahead, with wisdom earned, hope renewed, and gratitude from the bottom of our hearts for each of you.