House Of Hope initially started off as a feeding program at Shauri Moyo Baptist Church under the patronage of the late Pastor Charles Baraza, where young people and children would come for praise and worship sessions and later we would provide food, clean clothes, clean water and soap to those who were willing to clean themselves. At one session there would be more than 300 young people and children who would come mainly to be fed.
Due to lack of space and the growth pattern the venue at ShauriMoyo Baptist Church coupled with other logistical challenges compelled us to move the project to Ongata Rongai on the 5th of June 2003, where we currently operate from. Most of the street children who came, especially the young ones experienced shocking amounts of abuse while on the streets. They were subjected to abuse of drugs, selling of drugs, stealing and worse still sexual abuse. It is from such experiences that we decided to provide a safe haven for this group of young ones and safe guard them from the harsh life on the streets. Some of those rescued through our project had stayed for years on the streets without knowledge of their whereabouts by their families; they had ended up on the streets due to violence in their families, abuses both sexual and physical. Some had lost both their parents when they were young and they were forced to fend for themselves. They were pure survivors at a very young age. Some had been displaced from their homes as a result of political violence, which saw many families dispersed, some killed, their homes torched and property stolen.
Ours was to provide love to those who were unloved and despised in the society; it was to give positive spiritual guidance and role modeling, to give each young person that comes through our doors a new sense of self-empowerment, knowledge and respect for themselves and others, among others.
Over the 18 years we have been serving at Nyumba ya Tumaini, we have managed to work closely with over 500 children from the streets of Nairobi, Rongai, Kiserian, Matasia, Ngong, and other counties, during this time we also made it our mission to locate and reunite those from the streets with their families where the environment was conducive. We have also managed to take the older boys into various vocational training such as motor vehicle mechanics, carpentry and masonry just to name a few.