Context
Mount Kenya Trust is a non-profit organisation on a mission to sustainably conserve Mount Kenya ecosystems, ensuring people, wildlife, and forests coexist across the Mount Kenya landscape, a vast ecosystem covering over 150,000 hectares. Our work is complicated, intense, and often unpredictable. Wildfires erupt, human wildlife conflicts flare, and communities face changing environmental and economic pressures. After twenty-five years of on-the-ground conservation, the organisation needed systems to grow responsibly, strengthen accountability, and ensure long-term sustainability.
Work
I joined as Communications, Fundraising, and Grants Manager, working at the intersection of donor compliance, strategic positioning, programme delivery, and creative storytelling. My role meant taking technical data, monitoring outputs, and complex project realities and turning them into narratives, visuals, and experiences that could engage donors, inspire communities, and support fundraising. It was about connecting the science and the field with people, translating numbers and reports into stories that make sense, spark action, and show the true impact of our work.
Fundability
I manage a portfolio of donors, including Darwin Extra, Tusk Trust, International Elephant Foundation, CHASE Africa, Olvea Foundation, and more than a dozen others, working as part of a cross-functional team to handle full-cycle grants from proposal development to reporting. Together with programme staff, project managers, and communications colleagues, I co-design projects, build narratives for donor communications, and ensure that every story reflects both impact and field realities. Our team collectively oversees a portfolio of $192,500, combining careful stewardship with storytelling that demonstrates results. I collaborate closely with stakeholders, identify partnership opportunities with colleagues, and contribute to every donor engagement to strengthen Mount Kenya Trust’s brand as a credible, responsive, and innovative organisation capable of delivering meaningful work across the landscape.
Communications
Alongside grants, I lead communications and creative outputs for the organisation. This includes redeveloping and designing two websites, creating newsletters, pitch decks, annual reports, social media content, and project profiles. Every piece of content is crafted to convert technical or monitoring information into stories that are accessible and engaging. Photography, videography, graphic design, and web content become tools not just for visibility but for connection — connecting people to the landscapes, the communities, and the rangers working on the ground.
Campaigns like the 10to4 Mountain Bike Challenge and the Wildlife Ranger Challenge are more than fundraising events; they are opportunities to tell a story about Mount Kenya, to make conservation tangible and inviting. For the 10to4, I restructured communications, enhanced branding, and integrated a digital payment platform that allowed over 1,200 seamless transactions across two years. Sponsors have reportedly experienced value, participants were engaged, and the organisation strengthened its unrestricted funding. Every campaign iss crafted to ensure alignment between messaging, fundraising, and the organisation’s vision, while building professional, lasting partnerships.
Innovation & Programme Development
In education and programme innovation, I redesigned the Junior Ranger Programme to integrate digital literacy in schools, combining conservation education with practical technology skills. I worked with project personnel, creatives and ICT personnel to build an interactive e-learning platform, trained education teams in HTML and CSS, and helped schools prepare digital equipment so children could access the programme fully. By early 2026, the platform was functional and ready to scale. The programme received the 2023 Earth Ranger Conservation Tech Award for Best Use of Technology. The process was iterative, immersive, and always centred on the experiences of the children and teachers, ensuring that learning was meaningful and enjoyable.
Capacity
The Mount Kenya landscape moves fast, and stories are often lost if not captured in the moment. Recognising this, I initiated a decentralised storytelling system where rangers were trained in photography, videography, and storytelling, and donated cameras were deployed to capture frontline realities. Structured workflows ensured that these stories flowed from the field to communications, converting monitoring data into compelling narratives. This strengthened donor engagement, is gradually improving public understanding of conservation realities, and has allowed us to show the world what happens on the ground in real time.
Conclusion
Everything we are doing is connected, part of a continuous loop of
learning, impact, and communication. From transforming technical reports into
compelling stories to designing campaigns and digital experiences, the work is about making conservation tangible, understandable, and fundable while always
keeping the people and landscapes we serve at the centre of everything.