More Than The Grants: Ten Years with The Rees-Jones Foundation

How flexible operating support, emergency response, a shared commitment to disability justice, and personal engagement helped Kupenda grow.

Our relationship began with conversations in 2016. Over the decade since, Rees-Jones has paired something nonprofits rarely receive together: steady operating support and bold investment in the infrastructure, systems, and urgent needs that make long-term impact possible.

Rees-Jones also understands something easy to miss in disability work: access alone is not enough. Wheelchairs and inclusive classrooms do not help a child who is hidden at home or kept out of school because disability is seen as a curse. Kupenda’s work begins with those beliefs.

They fund what organizations need to grow

For years, Rees-Jones operating grants gave Kupenda the flexibility to strengthen our team, refine our model, and expand our reach. That patient support helped create the foundation for extraordinary growth at Kupenda: from improving the lives of 10,190 children with disabilities in 2017 to more than 150,000 in 2026!

Rees-Jones’s long term operating support enabled this by giving us the resources we needed to refine, pilot, and scale our stigma-reduction trainings for influential local leaders. Now the same pastors, healers, government officials and health workers who were once promoting a belief in curses and witchcraft as the cause of disability are the ones changing these views through public talks, family counseling, and advocacy for more inclusion in their communities.

They back the infrastructure behind impact

They also backed physical investments that changed what was possible. During Trevor Rees-Jones’ first visit to Kenya in 2019, he saw our work firsthand and committed resources for our Advocacy Center on the spot. No new grant application was required.

That investment became far more than a building. The site now houses a livelihoods training program, an income-generating farm, and an occupational therapy center. This year, Rees-Jones also funded a well that strengthened the farm’s ability to copy with Kenya’s frequent droughts while providing food and agriculture training to families in need.

Trevor meeting families during his 2026 visit and planting a tree at the Advocacy Center.

They understand the root cause of exclusion

That commitment goes beyond funding medical care. In a 2026 reflection on 20 years of international disability grantmaking, Rees-Jones Senior Program Officer Nathan O’Halloran wrote about how Kupenda’s pastor trainings change harmful beliefs about disability and help faith leaders become champions of inclusion.

It means a lot to us that Rees-Jones understands this. Medical care, therapy, and education can change a child’s life, but families may never seek those services if fear, shame, or misinformation keeps a child hidden at home. Changing those beliefs is what makes every other investment in disability inclusion more effective.

They respond when families cannot wait

When foreign aid cuts disrupted critical disability services in Kilifi, Rees-Jones stepped in. Their support restored antiseizure treatment for 100 children while Kupenda worked with government leaders to strengthen the county’s epilepsy care system. They also funded a new occupational therapy room, opening next month, that will roughly triple our therapy capacity and train future therapists in a county already facing a severe shortage of rehabilitation professionals.

They show up

What makes the relationship especially meaningful is that Rees-Jones has never felt like a distant funder. Trevor has personally visited our work in Kenya twice. During his most recent visit he walked the farm, spent time with our Kenyan leadership, and talked with our children, parents, and therapists.

Trevor Rees-Jones walking the Advocacy Center grounds with Kupenda’s Kenyan leadership during his 2026 visit.

We have also been welcomed in Texas several times, giving us the chance to share our work in person and build relationships with the skilled and compassionate team behind this partnership.

We are grateful to Jan and Trevor Rees-Jones for the vision behind a foundation that is willing to fund both the unglamorous work of organizational growth and the transformative investments that allow that growth to serve more people.

Ten years in, that trust is still helping children with disabilities access care and opportunity while changing the beliefs, systems, and communities that determine whether they are included in the first place.