An organisation that arrives slowly and stays.

Fieldstone Collective was registered in Lisbon in 2009 by three people who had spent the previous two years recording school attendance in one Kenyan district. They had no programme, no theory of change, and a first-year budget of €47,000.

What they had was a set of registers showing that attendance in the Nyakura Highlands collapsed every second term, recovered in the third, and did it again the following year. The cause was not a school. It was a river that became uncrossable for eleven weeks a year, and every adult in the valley already knew it.

The footbridge that answered it was paid for out of an education budget, which required an argument with two funders and a rewrite of our own programme definitions. It is the reason Fieldstone still begins every partnership by listening for a year rather than proposing in the first month.

Sixteen years later, the organisation works in six regions across four continents with 214 staff, of whom 187 are employed in the countries where they live. It has never opened a school, never registered an asset in its own name, and never signed a partnership agreement shorter than ten years.