For two years we ran outreach programmes. Good ones. We reached more than 150 people across the Federal Capital Territory, and on any given day the numbers looked healthy.
The problem with a good day
A bag of rice solves a week. Poverty is not an event you can respond to once — it is a condition that follows people, and the response has to follow them too.
We could not do that. We did not record who we served in a way that let us return to them. So we could report reach, and we could not report change. Those are different things, and publishing the first as though it were the second is the exact weakness that makes small organisations look inflated.
What changed
From September 2026 we work with a defined cohort. The same thirty women, recorded, returned to, with food security, health screening and a route into income. What we learn from them will shape how we design for the other three groups we serve.
It reaches fewer people this year. It is the only version of this work that can honestly claim to change anything.
