“Give people what they need: food, medicine, clean air, pure water, trees and grass, pleasant homes to live in, some hours of work, more hours of leisure. Don’t ask who deserves it. Every human being deserves it.”
― Howard Zinn, Marx in Soho: A Play on History
“Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.
Mzalendo Halisi Foundation is a Cultural Social Enterprise Leveraging Purpose, Social Capital & Incentives to mainstream the African Utu/Ubuntu Philosophy.
Humanity needs to chart a different course to tackle new and existential threats it faces. The Foundation’s journey of change revolves around core and cardinal values of Utu/Ubuntu that offer a tried and tested pathway to living and thriving in harmony with each other and nature.
We believe that traditionally, African communities survive and thrive through interdependence and through the social, spiritual and cultural bonds that enable us achieve common shared goals in addressing our challenges including those that inspire us to live in harmony with nature. Our shared sense of community and solidary inspire acts of compassion and empathy with each other regardless of our differences or any dimensions of diversity. We remain compassionate and respectful with each other and the environment around us basing our values, beliefs, rights and traditions as assets that cultivate dignity, respect and pride in self and others.
Mzalendo Halisi Foundation will revive the new Kenyan, African and Earthly Citizen; one whose spiritual, moral and social assets are grounded in a quest to realize a common humanity and shared future centered on fostering relationships of care for each other and nurturing Mother Earth, our home. I am because we are. Utu/Ubuntu.
The Foundation centers and grounds its works on three pillars, the 3 Cs: Common Good, Culture, and Community Organizing.
Nurturing what we share—whether material, cultural or institutional—for all or a majority of the members of our community through active citizenship, collective action, and active participation in decision making while taking responsibility and holding each other accountable. We are in this together.
Our customs, our norms, our values, our arts, our systems, our indigenous and social institutions, our collective wisdom, our achievements, our stories, our history and other manifestations of our intellectual achievements as Africans. We are leveraging our cultural wisdom and value systems to build dignifying systems that will center and ground the transformation we need and solve challenges in our governance as well as conservation of our planetary ecosystems for our common good now and in the future.
We are mobilizing our people and communities’ resources to catalyze and build the necessary power for imagining, identifying, building and systemizing solutions that will influence and shape our collective futures for the common good. We are the new dignified Citizens of the World building solidarity to mainstream solutions and the institutions that will build a bright future for Kenyans, Africans, humanity, and our planetary ecosystems.